Point of View: A Film Festival on the Politics of Environment ‘Point of View’ as it was aptly called, was a film festival with special focus on environment and politics, the festival made an attempt to place forward a different point of view on the state and status of environment. The festival started on the 16th of February and continued till 18th February at the Prasad Theatre. The Prasad Theatre located at Banjara Hills in Hyderabad, was a space with amazing capacities. The theatre boosts of Dolby sound system, excellent projection quality combined with excellent seating spaces. There are around 150 seating strength in the theatre, with more spaces in between, if at any point of time we went houseful. The theatre is parallel with any cinema theatre in any city, actually the spaces are far more better from many. It will be correct to say the experience of watching cinema, left you with a similar, maybe better feeling here. This film festival was made possible by coming together of the Hyderabad Film Club and Hyderabad Documentary Circle along with Magic Lantern Foundation and ECOMOVE (from Germany). The Hyderabad film club is an thirty years old group, and the documentary circle is an group from emerged from it. Everyday the film festival ran for three hours, the screening would start at 6 in the evening and continue till 9 in the night. Usually our audiences came in much before the screening started and some stayed on after the films for extensive discussions on some of the films. One the first day we had approximately 100 people for the total three hours, but by the third day we had a houseful. One felt the word of the festival might have spread around as with each passing day the numbers kept increasing in the audience. The first day started with introduction to the film festival and the idea and concept behind it, followed by an introduction to Under Construction (UC). Out of the 13 films screened at the festival 8 films were from the UC list, 1 from ECOMOVE, and the rest by independent filmmakers. Each film was followed by a small discussion and an open space for comments on the film. Amongst the films screened from UC list was also Ms. Gargi Sen’s ‘Goa Under Siege’, who was present for discussion after her film. Many interesting comments, for and against tourism came up from the audience, in the discussion following the screening. UC had set up space for display of its films (attached 3 stills), where the films on display were on rotation, to give each an equal space. There was a lot of interest generated for each film. The audience were very keen to know about most of the films. This festival was UC’s first step and interaction in person with Hyderabad :)& which proved to be a positive experience.   The films Day one: 16/02/2007 GREEN GOLD (fight of a lone woman against a toxic dump – Kyoto Politics) Dir: Heidi Bachram, South Africa, 29 minutes RESTLESS SHORES (fisher folk livelihoods affected by prawn exports) Dir: Noel Rajesh, India, 20 minutes 1000 DAYS AND A DREAM (Anti-Coca Cola Struggle and the people behind it) Dir: P. Baburaj and C. Saratchandran, India, 75 minutes THE ONE TREE PROJECT (waste of wood in chipping industry) Dir: Shivani Jean Cameron, Australia, 24 minutes Day Two: 17/02/2007 LIFE RUNNING OUT OF CONTROL (horrors of genetic engineering) Dir: Bertram Verhaag, Germany, 58 minutes HUNTING DOWN WATER (On the politics of water supply and ground water extraction) Dir: Sanjay Barnela and Vasant Saberwal, India, 32 minutes DOWNWIND: DEPLETED URANIUM WEAPONS IN THE AGE OF VIRTUAL WAR Dir: Jawed Metni, USA, 50 minutes A GREEN AGONY (Climate change effect on Sunderbans) Dir: Geeta Singh, India, 26 minutes   Day three: 18/02/2007 RIVER TAMING MANTRAS (The politics/scams of flood control in Eastern India) Dir: Sanjay Barnela and Vasant Saberwal, India, 38 minutes WASTE AS DEVELOPMENT AID (politics of waste dumping) Dir: Joost De Haas, The Netherlands, 25 minutes GOA UNDER SIEGE (impact of the tourism industry on local ecology) Dir: Gargi Sen, India, 30 minutes SUITS & SAVAGES: WHY THE WORLD BANK WON’T SAVE THE WORLD (Truths behind the Global Environment Fund) Dir: Zoe Young & Dylan Howitt, UK, 38 minutes TUNIN TECHNOLOGY TO ECOLOGY (a film about a veggie oil driven car) Dir: Izzy Brown, Australia, 15 minutes   Back