Times of India | 1 day ago
Tags: film world pandemic iffi unbalanced struggles social section rodo police panorama section panorama man isolation gessel
Panaji: The pandemic has brought into sharp focus the isolation and aloofness that can inhabit the modern urbanised and networked world. This emotion has been brought to the celluloid through some of the films at the 52nd International Film Festival of India (Iffi). Directed by Argentine filmmaker Juan Baldana, the film ‘Unbalanced’ tells the story of Rodo, who gets obsessed with writing a book about German-Argentine merchant, social activist and long-forgotten theoretical economist, Silvio Gessel. Gessel had propounded some revolutionary ideas about money and economy. The film is among the few Iffi films that is set in the post-Covid lockdown era and features in the World Panorama Section. “I wanted to capture the world before and after the pandemic and that is how ‘Unbalanced’ came about. We used drones for shooting. Even the police shown in some of the scenes are real police who came to frisk us. I also made my new-born baby a character in the film,” he said. The film, which had its Asian premiere at the 52nd Iffi, explores the intellectual and excruciating struggles of Rodo and how the mandatory social isolation in the wake of the pandemic as well as the spread of the virus infecting thousands of people across the world tends to stand in the way of his goals. ‘The Knocker,’ a short film in the Indian Panorama Section shows one man’s loneliness and solitary confinement and the inner struggles it gives birth to. The film is about a man living all by himself when he suddenly hears a knock on his front door. Matters become more complex when the knocks become routine. Director Ananth Narayan Mahadevan said that the film is an attempt to explore the psychic conflicts of men who live alone in cities for years on end due to work or other commitments.
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