From NE to int'l acclaim: Kurbah's ‘Ha Lyngkha Bneng' shines at Moscow film fest
's
Khasi film
'
Ha Lyngkha Bneng
' ('The Elysian Field') won the
Best Film
and Best Director award at the recent 47th
Moscow International Film Festival
. It also received the NETPAC Award for the Best Asian Film.
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The festival had 13 films from 13 countries participating in the main competition. Spanish filmmaker Luis Miñarro gave out the Golden Saint George and said the film's title can be interpreted "as a place where superior souls meet." The film is co-written by Paulami Dutta with sound design and mixing engineering by Saptak Sarkar and Sayantan Ghosh.
Cornel Gheorghita, one of the jury members said, "This is a very important film, which took me to a new level in world cinema when Sokurov, Kurosawa and Beckett came together."
Aleksey German Jr, another jury member said, "It is an incredibly bold film by a courageous, smart, subtle and perfectly humane director who did exactly what one shouldn't do to win at a festival — he removed all powerful narratives and themes and took people's feelings and emotions instead."
The 123-minute-long film was awarded for its philosophical expression of life and death through a "brilliant poetic visual language" enriched with "satire and humour," said Premendra Mazumder, the president of NETPAC jury.
"It is a cinematic gem from India," he added.
Kurbah, a self-taught director, said, "This is a small step forward for Indian independent cinema, which keeps trying to tell stories from the heart, even if they are not part of the mainstream. For films from the Northeast, it's a quiet but proud moment to see that even small, personal stories from our region can find their place and be accepted by audiences across the world."
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Kurbah's film is set in the Khasi Hills in 2047, also the year when India celebrates its centenary of independence. Six characters live in a village. "It has seen mass migration to cities and is not well connected by a motorable road, and faces intermittent power cuts. The geographical space amplifies their loneliness and loss, but the characters look for joy and embrace solitude. While one of them tries to get electricity to the village, another has found a family in a goat, and another decides to choose laughter at every place she has cried before," said writer Dutta.
Kurbah and Dutta devoted four years intermittently to finalise the first draft. The film was written during the pandemic when both were stuck in Bengaluru.
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