Times of India | 4 days ago | 25-11-2022 | 04:00 am
Panaji: Basti Vaman Shenoy was known as ‘Vishwa Konkani Sardar’ for his tremendous contribution for promotion of the language, and he famously founded the World Konkani Centre in Mangaluru. Now, his son Dinesh Shenoy has also decided to row against the tide and his film ‘Madhyantara’ will be the only new film to be screened at the ongoing 53rd International Film Festival of India (Iffi) that is shot in celluloid, when digital filmmaking is the norm.The 39-minute shortfilm has been selected to be screened as part of the Indian Panorama section at Iffi.‘Madhyantara’ was not only filmed in celluloid, but also using other processes of filmmaking prevalent in the 70 and the 80s, because Shenoy believes that celluloid has a magic, which digital filmmaking cannot replicate.“The result you can get from chemical process has a different magic, even though it may not look as crisp as digital filmmaking. I want people to go into celluloid filmmaking and explore the process,” said Shenoy, about why he chose to do his first film the hard way.His film tells the story of two young boys who dream big and eventually make it into filmmaking. Shenoy said that for his script he borrowed from the life of various filmmakers, about whom he read or watched their story online during the pandemic lockdown.“In digital filmmaking, one ends up shooting for one-hour for five minutes of scene so there is no clarity during the shooting. In celluloid filmmaking, the film cans are so expensive that film crew goes very well-prepared into shooting. In our case, we did four months of pre-production work,” Shenoy said, of his Kannada-language film.Though the post processing was lengthy, Shenoy said he would want to make the next film too the old-fashioned way.“There is not a single processing lab today in Bengaluru, so we had a runner travelling to Mumbai with the cans for processing while the filming was still on. He would go by bus as the x-ray scanners in flight could affect the film. Once he took the cans to Mumbai, we would know only after three days post filming a shot if the result was as we wanted it,” said Shenoy, who was part of the filmmaking team of Ashutosh Gowarikar’s ‘Swades’ in the past.
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