Osian's Cinefan

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Introduction 10th OCFF

Film List

Contacts

In association with
the Government of NCT of Delhi

Hospitality Partner

The journey of Osian’s-Cinefan has been one of steady expansion. The idea of holding a festival of Asian cinema was consistent with Cinemaya The Asian Film Quarterly which Aruna Vasudev and her team had published for more than a decade before the festival was launched. The driving force behind the magazine was to give a platform to critics writing on the many resplendent and award-winning films that were coming out of Asia. The festival emerged slowly from that first impassioned effort, that engaging madness.

And so began Cinefan in 1999. With support from the Government of Delhi and the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC), it brought a clutch of 27 Asian films to audiences in Delhi. This first edition celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Indian New Wave with films by Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Ketan Mehta, Goutam Ghose, Kumar Shahani, Jahnu Barua and Nandan Kudhyadi. Films from several Asian countries were shown but the spotlight was turned on Japan that year.

Cinefan was the first to pay tribute to Smita Patil in 2000 with a selection of nine films. More tributes to cinema masters would be paid in the following years: Akira Kurosawa (2002), Guru Dutt, Wong Kar-wai and the Makhmalbaf family (2004), Satyajit Ray and Hou Hsiao-hsien (2005), Stanley Kwan, Ritwik Ghatak and New Theatres (2007) and Kenji Mizoguchi (2007) among others. With this second edition began a series of collaborations too - Cinemathèque Française (2000), Hubert Bals Fund (2004), Fortissimo Films and Fonds Sud and European Coordination of Film Festivals (2005) that made for a most inspiring and eclectic programme.

One early thematic section was ‘The West Looks East’ begun in 2001, comprising films made on Asia by non-Asian directors – Peter Brook, Alain Corneau, Fritz Lang, Bernardo Bertolucci and Jors Ivens among others. How did filmmakers from Europe and elsewhere view Asian countries and represent them on the screen? What fresh light did they throw on situations that we take for granted at home, situations seen through the slant of another culture? That section saw a slight transformation over the years – to East-West Encounters and still later to Cross- Cultural Encounters, a theme of universal resonance as people cross borders either through compulsion or by design.

The third edition – Tata Tea Cinefan – went competitive for the first time with a selection of 12 films. More competition sections were added later – Indian films, first features and, from this year onwards, films that deal with the intolerance of our times and attempts to overcome or combat it. This