FILM FESTIVAL AND BEST FILM CRITIC COMPETITION
The film club of GCTE, Trivandrum organised a film festival and best film critic competition on November 23, 2022 at the UGC Hall. The film show started at 3:30 pm and two short films "Aasai" directed by Sam and "Tippen Box" directed by Karthik Gopal were displayed. Both the short films were orginally made in Tamil and shown with English subtitles. Though the organisers planned to show the animation film "Encanto", technical issues crept in and it became impossible to fulfill the task.
In both short films two children occupy the central role. Though short in duration, were replete with emotional depth and intellectual appeal. These films are open ended and provides further hope to the central characters in the moment of crisis. These scenes influenced the viewers and made them emotional to an extend. A study of child psychology can be done in both films. Though the films were not recent they depict the murky realities of our country. Still there are many children in our country who pass through the same situation and live with a frozen hope. The struggles seen in the movie are real and is relevant even today and will be relevant in the future too unless the country and the government is able to provide for them and to cultivate a welfare state for all.
1. Aasai
Short film "Aasai" won the Best Short Film in Indian Film Festival 2010, in Melbourne Australia. The film had competed with more than 200 films from India and emerged as the winner in the Indian category. It received lot of appreciation from leading film makers of like Rajkumar Hirani, Mr. Imitaz Ali, and Mr. Sohail Khan. "Aasai" centres around a poor and deprived child Selvam who works in a grocery shop to eke out a living. It pictures a time when our monthly telephone bills exceeded our grocery bills. The setting, much like the hueless life of the child protagonist, is rather dull. The film throws light upon the social issue of child labour only in a peripheral manner with Selvan asserting at one point in his soliloquy that his boss treats him well. Still the treatment meted out to him by the society at large is to be analysed and questioned, given that in the first place, he is made to toil for a living at a very young age. 'Aasai' , as the title suggests, is more about human desires and dreams, which may last longer than we imagine them to be. Selvam works towards the realisation of a seemingly simple dream which is to talk to his mother over a telephone since his workplace is far from where his mother is living. He willingly burdens himself with delivery errands just to amass coins necessary to make that phone call. Towards the end of the film, we see him procuring the needed amount to make the call but because it took a long time to get his mother connected on the other end of the telephone, he could not make the much longed-for chat. Despite this attempt being a failure, Selvam does not give in. His perseverance, fortitude and determination to continue his hard work are valuable messages for the viewers. At the end the viewers feel sympathetic to Selvam.
2. Tippen Box
Children are the greatest mankind can ever hope for – Pure, innocent & unadulterated. But the world can be cruel even to them, over something simple like a ‘Tippen Box'. 'Tippen Box' revolves around a school boy of grade 5 who hails from a wretched and poverty stricken background. He is gripped by the shame of not even possessing a good tiffin box which he could carry to his school and share food with his classmates. Yet, he is matured enough to understand the deplorable familial conditions which prevent him from asking his labourer-father to buy a new tiffin box for him. The solution which he comes up with to tackle this predicament is to run to his home from school at noon to have his lunch at home. However, everytime he returns to school after having lunch, the afternoon session classes would have already begun and he is regularly punished by the teacher for coming late to the class. He is physically tortured by being asked to kneel down on the ground in searing heat of the sun despite him repeatedly imploring to the teacher to revoke the punishment. Once when his English teacher promises a tiffin box as the gift for the highest-scoring student of a class test, he works hard for the coveted gift in vain. And as he himself mentions in an essay about his own dream, he 'continues to run'. The film not only unveils the penury in which the boy's family is caught, but also imparts the lesson that as teachers we should be considerate to students and try to understand and solve their problems in all possible ways instead of resorting to corporeal punishments for trivial things.
Following the screening of the two films, review and criticism writing competition was held.
