Focus Theme: Rebooting `new India’?

ViBGYOR International Short and Documentary Film Festival, Thrissur, Kerala, is entering its 13th year. The festival is a celebration of human spirit, expressed through the medium of cinema, with its inherent nobility and diversity. It covers the living experience of millions of people across the globe, witnessed and retold in the form of documentary and short fiction films, by a number of skilled and committed filmmakers from different parts of the world. The films, which talk about the struggles of people for survival and for identity and dignity, find the right audiences at ViBGYOR. The four-day Film festival creates space for a constructive interface between filmmakers, activists, leaders of people’s movements, academicians, students and common people from diverse streams of life. The 13th Edition of ViBGYOR Festival is scheduled for November 07-10 at different venues in the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Campus. The Focus of the Year theme for this edition is `Rebooting: New India?’ We begin the Festival with the 8th C. Saratchandran Memorial Lecture delivered by Ms. Anuradha Bhasin, Executive editor of Kashmir Times and a fearless media and human rights activist, who successfully brought the issue of Kashmir and Kashmiri people in to the Supreme Court filing a case for press freedom and freedom for all people of Kashmir. At the festival, apart from the Memorial Lecture and screening of around 50 films, there will be discussion forums, namely `Mini Conferences’, Media dialogue on the topic `MANY INDIAS: Peoples’ Narratives and Media Narratives’ and the ‘ViBGYOR Campaign: Forest Rights’.