heiks

I am currently moving this blog from my .mac site, so posts are from 2006, until I catch up to myself! If you've found this blog, you probably know me. If you don't know me, hello there! I mainly blog about my life in Paris (France) and what is happening in my life as an actor (or actress if you want to be British. Maybe ACTRON is less gender-specific. Shall we try that then?). So, yes, here we all are. Have fun.

Monday, October 09, 2006

Q and A, Bollywood-style


I’m not quite sure why we were there because we hadn’t seen the film in question, but at some point during the Raindance Festival, Josephine and I attended the Question and Answer session for a Bollywood movie. Although, to be fair, we would not have understood the film anyway, as it was shown without subtitles. and it was not a Bollywood musical-love-story, so we couldn’t have made it up. The filmmakers and producers were deeply apologetic, but something went wrong with the film they were originally scheduled to show, so they showed a different one, and something had gone wrong with that one also, so it didn’t have a subtitle print.

The film’s director - a very shy, soft-spoken fellow - spoke with such a thick indian accent that half the time I was sure he was speaking Hindi. What I did catch was that all his films are about "shoshal ishoes" and that he is considered the indian Tarantino. He is a brand and his films are concept films - thus far removed from conventional indian films. He spoke about his upcoming film "Traffic Light" which is about beggars and eunuchs at a traffic light (in Bombay, I think) and the whole industry that has formed around that traffic light. The distributor of the film wanted to show us the trailer as it is their Next Big Thing. So the Q and A was halted for the trailer and the panelists (Director, Distributor and Film Festival Director) sat down in the front row.

- We waited, but nothing happened.

Eventually, the panelists got up again and Q and A was resumed, whilst the projectionist faffed with the reel. An image flashed on the screen behind the panelists, so the Q and A was abruptly halted and the panelists sat down in the front row again.

But....nothing further happened, so the panelists took the stage once more and the Q and A continued. Due to all the frantic sitting down and getting up again, they kept losing the thread of the discussion and so the Qand A was like something out of a comic film that had us all giggling.

This process went on (we were having fun, so why stop a good thing?) until after the 4th time, it finally worked! We watched the hotly-awaited trailer.... and then we watched the hotly-awaited trailer again. The projectionist must have been so excited that to make up for the wait, he ran it twice in a row. Eventually, just as it was about to start a third time, the distributor got up and called for the lights to come back on. It was surreal... and I suspect very much in keeping with the way these things happen in India (ask Jörg, I’m sure he’ll agree!) Unscheduled film, no subtitles, no trailer and then double-dose of trailer. At the end of the comedy of errors, the famous director sent us off saying: “Tank yoo tu bee a lovely ohwdience” and got mobbed by a crowd of his fellow countrymen outside.

(photo: the T-shirt we were given upon leaving, sponsored by the Indian Distribution Co)

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