There is no denying the fact that commercial cinema caters mostly to urbanities, "Though there have been good movies like Padman and Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, we have mostly been fed the Karan Johar variety of movies," says Dr Akansha Shukla, Associate Professor and Head (CDC), Center for Development, Documentation and Communication, National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj (NIRDPR), Hyderabad. We couldn't help, but agree with her. So, for the fourth year now, NIRDPR has been urging youngsters to look at rural areas which is no less than a treasure trove of undiscovered yet need-to-be-told stories, through its fourth National Film Festival on Rural Development being held today, that is, November 20, 2019, at the Vikas Auditorium, NIRDPR campus.
Themed talk
"Three events are part of our Foundation Day celebrations — the Foundation Day lecture, the mela at our rural technology park and this film festival," says Dr Shukla, who took over the extra charge of the film festival last year. The categories of films are divided into two — fiction and documentary. While the theme for the documentary category is Government Schemes on Rural Development and for the fiction category, the theme is Films Under Different Genres Related to Rural Development. "To encourage students and college goers, we had also started a thematic mobile film contest on themes Cultural Continuity — Real to Urban and Diminishing Divide — Rural to Urban. These movies need to be three to five minutes long," she informs.
Winners have it all
The first prize winners will win a cash prize of Rs 50,000, the second and third winners will win Rs 25,000 and Rs 15,000 respectively. The winners will also have to agree to give their screening rights to the institute so that the films can be used for training purposes in the future. They received more than 96 entries and all of them were screened by an internal jury first comprising three faculty members of NIRDPR while the external jury who selected the winners comprised Rizwan Ahmad Director, Instructional Media Center, Maulana Azad National Urdu University; independent filmmaker CG Sriguha and Dr Kennedy Pilli, Associate Professor, University of Hyderabad. A few criteria for selection were being not more than 45 minutes long, should not be older than three years and if shot in a regional language, should have English subtitles.
The chief guest for the event will be Dr Rajkumar Upadhyay, ITS, Additional Director General, South Zone, DD and AIR and it will be presided over by Dr WR Reddy, IAS, Director-General, NIRDPR.
