Part of the culturebagh series, a festival of film screenings, sound performance and music recitals

The film screenings are each concerned with the nature of live performance and seen through the lens of Indian classical music.

Returning To The First Beat | 2017 | 82 mins 59 secs | Dir.  Surabhi Sharma
Hindustani music and its musicians traveled through Girgaon, a neighbourhood that was a part of the native town in colonial Bombay. This was after the decline of the princely states who were the patrons of many of the renowned musicians of the time. This film reflects on the sites for both music performances and pedagogy clustered in and around Girgaon. This film ‘listens’ to architectural structures in an attempt to reflect on the deep history of this practice. In narrativising the love of music that took shape in this neighbourhood we also seek to experience ‘film time’ rather than evoke a time past or record the present. The film seeks repetition and cyclical time to imagine a narrative on music. Phir se samm pe aana seeks to experience an interior, almost intimate practice of the musical form.

Kaifiyat | 2019 | 45 mins 48 secs | Dir. Elroy Pinto (Preview)
Kaifiyat is based on the syncretic nature of the tabla as a musical instrument and the playing style of Ustad Nizamuddin Khan (d.2000). It explores the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction through interspersing a narrator’s role as a storyteller or narration as a form of self-expression, or a narrative that delves in history and documenting reality as is. All of this within a rich soundscape of music and environmental rhythms. The tabla, much like Nizamuddin’s style, developed in the courts of Indo-Islamic rulers of India. The film unfolds as a kaleidoscope, bringing together six sequences that weave a connection between several traditional Indian art forms, such as Indian classical music, Kathak dance and Indo-Persian miniature painting as well as glimpses of Nizamuddin and his family surviving the harsh socio-economic surroundings in the city of Mumbai. Kaifiyat is a state of mind or mood induced in a person while experiencing a work of art.

Bhairav | 2017 | 58 mins 42 secs | Dir. Munir Kabani + Nikhil Chopra  (Preview)
Bhairav is a new film by Munir Kabani and Nikhil Chopra, featuring Sajan Mani, Madhavi Gore and musician Ustad Bahauddin Dagar. Bhairav, from which the film takes its name, is considered to be one of the most ancient raags in Hindustani classical music, typically played in the early hours welcoming the dawn. Here, the raag sets the tone of the work, as the film reveals the architecture and landscape of Goa through precolonial, colonial and postcolonial eras. The work explores man’s relationship with the earth, spirituality and the passage of time, also highlighting issues of marginalisation.