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Indian Express
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
17th Habitat Film Festival turns the spotlight on doyens of Indian cinema
Shyam Benegal's debut film Ankur was unprecedented in more ways than one. Besides challenging the template of a quintessential Bollywood film as we knew it, it addressed real yet uncomfortable issues of feudalism as well as caste and gender politics, sans dance and music. The 1974 film, starring Shabana Azmi and Anant Nag, is credited with heralding a new wave of cinema in India. Benegal's illustrious life and career will be celebrated with an expansive retrospective at the 17th edition Habitat Film Festival (HFF) between May 16 and 25 at Delhi's India Habitat Centre. The director's contributions as the pioneer of parallel cinema would be commemorated in an exhibition, 'The Cinema of Shyam Benegal', featuring archival material from the Tuli Research Centre for India Studies. Alongside Ankur, the retrospective will also see the screenings of the path-breaking Mandi, the iconic Manthan and the memorable Junoon. Besides Benegal, the festival will pay tribute to several other stalwarts of Indian cinema, including Azmi, who is celebrating 50 years of her career, and director Aparna Sen, both of whom will be in conversation with each other before the screening of Ankur. 'We celebrate 50 years of three iconic stars in Indian cinema, we pay tribute to some legends of Indian Cinema on their 100th birth anniversary year and raise a hurrah for contemporary cinema trailblazers,' said Vidyun Singh, Creative Head Programmes, Habitat World, India Habitat Centre. Other legends of the screen who celebrate 50 years on the silver screen include the Southern showstoppers Rajnikanth and Chiranjeevi. A talk by S V Srinivas, Professor at the School of Liberal Studies, Azim Premji University in Bengaluru, will chronicle the characteristics, limitations and possibilities of southern superstardom. A vibrant 'Dastangoi Dastan-e-Raj Kapoor', directed by Mahmood Farooqui and performed by Rajesh Kumar and Rana Pratap Sengar, will celebrate the actor's birth centenary year. There will also be a screening of his iconic film Awaara, an exhibition of posters of the art of Kapoor's cinema, and a screening of a documentary on the actor directed by Siddharth Kak. Birth centenary year celebrations of Muhammad Rafi, Talat Mahmood and Tapan Sinha will be marked by a discussion of books on their illustrious careers and a screening of a Tapan Sinha film. The lives of Aruna Vasudev, 'Mother of Asian Cinema' and founder NETPAC, and Manoj Kumar, will be celebrated with screenings of NETPAC award-winning films and Kumar's Upkaar, respectively. The festival this year will screen 24 films, across different Indian languages, that highlight varied social issues, including human-environment conflict (Raavsahab, Sangala), and gender and caste discrimination (Swaha, Appuram, Aajoor). That cinema is a mirror to society comes through in Humans in the Loop, which looks at the advent of AI. Meanwhile, films such as Cinema pe Cinema and Behind the Scenes turn the camera inwards, focussing on the world of cinema. The festival, however, promises to be more than just a platform to see films. This year, it expands its role to offer a learning experience through an extended masterclass by Neville Tuli of Tuli Research Centre for India Studies, on cinema as a critical educational resource. 'The workshops will be especially interesting for students, academics and faculty members who are primarily interested in using the world of cinema to integrate across all other subjects with an in-depth and relatively unique interdisciplinary pedagogic approach to learning,' an organiser said. The HFF also brings back its segment dedicated to documentary and short films, with a series of innovative feminist documentaries that explore diverse, lived experiences, expressions and reflections as women, trans and queer persons. Also, on the roster are acclaimed and awarded films from the festival circuit. There's Pyre, Nukkad Natak, Beline, Dhrubor Aschorjo Jibon, Sangala, Mikka Bannada Hakki, Feminist Fathima, Victoria, and the 2024 Cannes Grand Prix awardee, All We Imagine As Light by Payal Kapadia. 'As cinema gains more traction with the onset of revolutionary technologies such as OTT, it's important to promote a culture where films aren't just watched but also understood and appreciated. The festival also aims to initiate the new generation into the art of cinema to facilitate the emergence of young, new storytellers, cinematographers, actors and directors who would further enrich both Indian and world cinema with their creativity, energy and dedication,' said KG Suresh, Director, India Habitat Centre.
Business Standard
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Standard
Tuli Research Centre for India Studies Launches tuliresearchcentre.org
NewsVoir New Delhi [India], May 1: The Tuli Research Centre for India Studies (T.R.I.S.) proudly announces the launch of a path-breaking digital platform offering free, open access to the most comprehensive integrated visual-textual knowledge base on India's modern and contemporary fine arts, popular arts, cinema, photography, architectural heritage, graphic arts, animal welfare, and cultural economics and thought, so allowing a new conceptual framework for India Studies. The platform's launch marks the culmination of Neville Tuli's three-decade-long journey as a cultural institution builder, beginning with the founding of HEART (The Tuli Foundation for Holistic Education and Art, 1995-99), advancing through Osian's Connoisseurs of Art (2000-21) to Vanraja Sanctuary & Hospice (2015-), and culminating now with T.R.I.S. - an institution dedicated to researching upon and sharing an expansive archive, knowledge base, and library for public and scholarly engagement. Tuli's pioneering ideas on education, transdisciplinary knowledge-building, and the fusion of image-text-audio learning within a holistic conceptual framework of theory, experience, and archival preservation have shaped these endeavors. His vision has consistently championed the creation of autonomous spaces of intellectual inquiry, where knowledge is expansive, free, and participatory. Platform Overview: was conceptualized by Neville Tuli post-2020 though it has been evolving for nearly three decades through his writings, personal research, curation, and transdisciplinary knowledge development. The platform places images on par with carefully curated textual and audio materials. It has been built using the most basic technology of the Excel Sheet, thousands of manually structured and templated Excel sheets of knowledge then transformed into web data by the coding team. This foundational approach allows the platform to power a world-class Search and Filter Engine, with each cultural object and archival document serving as the basic unit. Users are empowered to conduct precise inquiries across multiple fields, retrieving highly tailored results that foster deeper, self-directed exploration. The India Studies platform is created upon Tuli's uniquely conceptualised sixteen Research Categories. These are then linked to thousands of carefully selected Masterlists which are represented by "A-Graphy" pages, and these are all inter-related and contextualised through 100,000+ visual and textual objects in v1.0. In v1.1 the structure of the Post and their Q & A are added to begin the deeper engagement process of the visitors, which will soon lead to the personally customised curricula framework by v1.2 so hopefully offering a groundbreaking model for how archives and educational frameworks can be reimagined to take forward learning and educational models. Version 1.0 (30th April 2025): Public launch of the Search and Filter Engine with sample Masterlist pages and access to 100,000+ objects. Version 1.1 (30th June 2025): Expansion of Masterlist A-Graphy pages and object collections. Version 1.2 (30th September 2025): Introduction of the customised curricula framework for "Self-Discovery via Rediscovering India." Version 2.0 (1st January 2026): Full roll-out of support systems for top colleges and universities, particularly in India and Cultural Studies. A Call to Reimagine Education At its heart, is built on a simple but powerful belief that Knowledge must belong to all. Education must be free. Inquiry must be boundless. We live by the principle that every answer leads to a deeper question sustaining the eternal process of learning, discovery, and the joy inherent in consciousness itself. The Tuli Research Centre for India Studies stands in solidarity with students, teachers, and lifelong learners everywhere, demanding an educational future that transcends economic and institutional barriers a future where access to deep knowledge, critical thinking, and creative exploration is a right, not a privilege. represents a bold commitment to this future: a platform that democratizes India's artistic, cultural, and intellectual legacies, inviting scholars, academics, students, and the wider public into a living, evolving dialogue with India's rich creative traditions and global intersections.
