SARC: 'The Innovative Parallel'

Anil Zankar, from Film and Television Institute of India, will talk about the vibrant trends in the regional cinema in India. While Bollywood cinema has been seen as the flagship of popular Indian culture over the years, the other regional film industries have been strong and have their own histories. While the mainstream Hindi films by and large deal in stereotypes; changing only superficially, the innovation is present in greater measure in the regional films. This innovation has a history of a few decades in the post-Independent India. Overall, the regional films tend to experiment with form, and explore new themes. They have ethnicity of a deeper kind through characters, language, and landscape, and are quite often based on local literature. They also depict interiority in geographical, psychological, sociological dimensions, and serve as richer indices of Indian reality as compared to the traditional Hindi film narratives.