Sitting somewhere in the city with your friends at midnight, a vision or a scene from your childhood or the first film you saw in theaters, do you remember these things?
One life, your life is a reality that you crafted from the stories you heard, saw or experienced. You consume these stories, they make your thoughts, thoughts create your beliefs, beliefs turn into actions and actions maketh man. Thus, the way you are now, the way you live is because of the stories you consumed, therein lies the genesis of your behavior and your behavior affects the world.
Therefore, the man is made of stories. The nature of these stories is his nature, what he wants to tell, what he wants to hear, what he has experienced and so on sculpt his emotional marble. But in such short breath, how do we see, hear and experience all the great stories? How do we get the best ones? And most importantly how do we freeze them in time? Well, the answer lies in the art and industry of Cinema. It delivers the story to you in a quite comprehensive version; it captures the truthfulness of light, the emotional purity of sound and enriches the eyes of the beholder. Cinema is somewhere between the life you lived and the life you could not live, so, it brings you the best of both lives. And ‘the better’ lives you live, the better stories you see, the richer you will be. This philosophy is related not only with your personal life but also with the society as whole because for the society, stories make opinions and opinions create ideals and mentalities. Therefore, it follows that the society you see now is the effect of the stories we consumed, or the stories we ignored.
The films and such content that a certain society consumes tells you everything you need to know about the depth and expanse of its emotional spectrum. When we nurture the society with the great stories from every corner of the human heart, we not only create a rich audience but also emotionally developed human beings. I have experienced both of these creations at the Ajanta Ellora Film Festival 2025. Held in a not-so-mainstream city like Aurangabad, it certainly is cultivating an audience with a sense of empathy. Currently in their 10th year AIFF tells us that such Film Festivals are not only to celebrate Cinema as an Art but to recognize and channelize the impact of stories upon the opinions of a society. It captured the ‘quantum nature’ of the cinema, showing the brightest peaks of the nature and darkest valleys of man and everything in between. Similarly, each year AIFF weaves together best of the world, national and regional cinema, thus, covering it all. In addition to that, each year, a filmmaker is awarded with ‘Padmapani Award’ which honors the filmmaker as an artist as well as a social change maker. This year it was awarded to Sai Paranjape, a renowned writer and director and a prominent figure in Indian parallel cinema. The special thing about these awards is the valuable conversations that take place afterwards, where, in a ‘master class’ style setting, the filmmakers share their stories and their thoughts upon the nature of cinema. These ‘master classes’ are super inclusive, from a novice film enthusiast to a mid-career professional can get something significant and valuable out of them because each master class has a different aspect of focus, some are technical some are philosophical and some are simply conversational. And I believe these master classes are as important as films, because it is a great source of imbibing ‘connoisseur culture’ instead of simply being consumers of whatever the big blockbuster is.
Another highlight of AIFF is its focus and encouragement for regional cinema. This does two things, one, it makes us aware of the stories that surround us and also the social cracks and patches which we are uninformed or misinformed of. Two, it promotes the regional artists and film makers to become serious about their craft and provides them with a stage. The organizers especially Mr. Nilesh Raut and the team have been doing an outstanding job in harmonizing these two elements and adding grandeur to the festival each year since the last decade. Thus, this fest is set to leave its mark on the Indian film scenario as a proud product of our culture and Deccan’s rich diversity.
With all this together, AIFF tries to deliver the cinema in its true and intended form. This activity might seem like something complimentary or just a social gathering, but in the long run it will prove to be the foundation of the community dynamics. Because, this, the film festival, is an initial stage or ‘the cause’ or in farming terms, the sowing. The effects of this will be seen in the pickiness of the people when it comes to online as well as film content, people will be conditioned to watch something better, to watch something that they truly love. Such conditioning turns consumers to connoisseurs or in simple terms, it will instill a habit of watching a good film every now and then instead of consuming it just for the sake of popularity. And that will be our ‘harvest’ and then we will see how caring about the content we watch changes people and society as whole.
–
Shrivardhan Takalkar,
Student SB College of Commerce, Film enthusiast & Short Film Maker
