Shillong duo's film at London Film Festival

From Staff Correspondent

Shillong, Oct 6: The prestigious British Film Institute, the leading institution for cinema in the United Kingdom that was established by British Royal Charter in 1933, will be showing a film by two Shillong-based filmmakers at the 61st London Film Festival this year.

“Noise Life I”, a film by Sol Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya, will be shown at the festival that kicks off on Friday. The section in the festival is “Excavating Loss” in which “Landscape and architecture bear witness to melancholia, decay and desire. From politics to folklore, poetry to drama, these films map out a collision of tradition and modernity.” Jain and Madhukaillya have been working together since 2004 as a duo known to the global art world as Desire Machine Collective.

Jain describes “Noise Life I” as “a film with sound”. And it is “an exploration of schizophrenia and the colonisation of human sensibility by ‘noise’ in a post-industrial sonic environment …,” says Jain. “The objective of ‘Noise Life I’ is to sketch out a history of the different ways in which we develop knowledge about ourselves: economics, biology, psychiatry, medicine and penology. It seeks to alyze these so-called sciences as very specific ‘truth games’ related to specific techniques that we use to understand ourselves.”

The duo is emerging as the most innovative contemporary artist/film-makers in India. Their masterful short film “Residue” was part of the major show “Being Singular Plural: Moving Images of India” show at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Deutsch Guggenheim Museum.

Jain has received accolades and recognition around the world for her work, which has been featured at prestigious museums like New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; MAXXI, Rome; the Venice Bienle; La Trienle, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Tate Modern London and the Centre Pompidou Paris. She is now one of few Indians making a foray into cinema of a kind made famous by auteurs such as Ingmar Bergman and Wong Kar Wai.