Santipur: In an attempt to make people aware about local culture and heritage, a mobile documentary film festival cum competition was organised in Nadia’s Santipur on Sunday.
15 short documentary films on local culture and heritage of Bengal each with 10 minutes duration shot exclusive on mobile phones in English and Bengali languages were shown on giant LED screen at the daylong festival held at the Kalatirtha art gallery.
The organizers claimed that the objective is to encourage the study of culture and heritage using mobile phone which witnessed remarkable growth in its usage in recent times and made the art of film-making more accessible and easier with high-quality footage on handheld device.
A panel of four juries consisting of documentary film makers, researchers and historians picked up ‘Darja’ (Door) directed by Sadhan Dutta as the best entry. The film depicted transformation of architectural patterns of doors in old building across Bengal. “Tilakmati” directed by Preetam Debnath and ‘Jaleshwar Mandir’ directed by Ajay Dutta were picked up as the second and third top choice.
Pratim Sen, one of the organizers said, “Our aim is to encourage the young generation to study our culture and heritage at their convenience. Since the cellphone developed a ubiquitous presence in our society now, it becomes a good medium to fascinate young minds to learn heritage and cultures which otherwise appear as dull subject. We just tried to use cellphone as a viable means to study the subject by making film using the small device”.
Amitabha Mitra, a researcher and one of the organizers said, “The mobile movies have developed to be a very popular genre across the globe. International film festivals on mobile movies and documentaries are being regularly held in many countries now. We just tried to explore this trend injecting the idea among the young minds here for sake of our heritage and culture”.
Ridom Saha, a documentary film maker from East Burdwan said, “It is a great opportunity to materialize dream of a film-maker in own way, using limited resources and device to reach people and to encourage them to preserve their rich past”.