When his aunt suggested that he join a filmmaking workshop during the school vacations, 14-year-old Shubhojit Roy jumped at the chance to write, direct and edit his own movie along with seven other children.
When his aunt suggested that he join a filmmaking workshop during the school vacations, 14-year-old Shubhojit Roy jumped at the chance to write, direct and edit his own movie along with seven other children. What emerged from the 10-day sessions of brainstorming and putting theory into practice was Subbu’s Noodles, a movie that explores the melting pot nature of Mumbai as seen from the eyes of its young makers.
The 12-minute film will now rub shoulders with several other films made by children from all over the world in the ‘Little Directors’ category of the International Children’s Film Festival India (ICFFI), 2011.
An animation short film, Superhero, about a bumbling superhero who botches up his own efforts to avert a bank robbery by a different group of Mumbai-based school kids has also made it to ICFFI.
The annual festival, which is organised by the Children’s Film Society of India (CFSI) to commemorate Children’s Day, will be held this year in Hyderabad between November 12 and 20. ICFFI will screen more than 150 films from 35 countries under different categories.
Young delegates and filmmakers from India and abroad are invited by CFSI to participate in the festival to meet and interact with each other. “We will be viewing films from around the world, attending workshops and participating in discussions about film-making,” said an excited Shubhojit, who has aspirations to be a filmmaker when he grows up.
“The children were encouraged to do everything from conceptualising, writing, shooting, performing to editing the films. We only acted as facilitators by empowering them to explore their own imagination and create original works of art,” said Priya Srinivasan, director of The Pomegranate Workshop, a Mumbai-based company that develops educational content for children and adults.
In Subbu’s Noodles, two young protagonists interact with people of different communities living in their housing colony. The kids, all between 10 and 14 years of age, explored their immediate neighbourhood and observed people in their day-to-day life before constructing the storyline. The other entry, Superhero uses chalk animation to pull off a spoof on a superhero, who does a good job swinging in the clouds but falls into trouble every time he lands on the ground.
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