24th Madurai Film Festival 2022 : Retrospective - Joshy Joseph

24th Madurai International Documentary and Short Film Festival 2022

6-10 Dec, multiple venues, Madurai

Highlight # 1

Retrospective : Joshy Joseph

Joshy Joseph has, as a maker of unique documentaries, consistently extended and blurred the boundaries that separate factual record from creative filmmaking, until these demarcations no longer serve any useful purpose. Joseph is concerned with the unfixed nature of our globalised world, but his approach isn't thematic.

He had won six National Awards for making films and one National Award for writing on Cinema from the President of India.He is an author of three books in Malayalam. Had associated with poet Dunya Mikhail for a film with her autobiographical poems. Worked with famed filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan. Participated in a script writing workshop by Jean Claude Carrier at French Embassy. Officially associated while shooting 'Life of Pi' with Hollywood Director Ang Lee.

List of films to be shown :

1) One Day from a Hangman's Life (83 min)

"One Day From A Hangman's Life" – a film made by me, revolves around the highly debated event of 2004 in Kolkata – that of the hanging of Dhananjoy Chatterjee – a rapist, and the media hype on the hangman, Nata Mallik. It documents an eventful day and captures the hangman in all his hues and the media at its manipulative best in a candid manner.

'ONE DAY FROM A HANGMAN'S LIFE' is a fusion of life and death. Life finding its fulfillment in death. And fact finds its culmination in fiction. This is not about a murder, but it's about a 'murderer's
murder'. Not personal, but a social murder of how death is sanctified by a social sanction. The film naturally becomes a self-criticism of our social system itself. And in a way it shows the other side of
human emotions or the bi-polarity of emotions of how we revel in crime, in violence and how we relish things, which we deny in waking life.

2) Walking Over Water (89 min)

Walking Over Water is an auto fiction,which is a blend of fiction and nonfiction and curiously ,the filmmaker is visually absent in this experimental film.

3) Aribam Syam Sharma- Laparoscopic Cinemascapes (62 min)

This film is a stylistic antithesis of Manipuri Maestro Aribam Syam Sharma, in the usage of idiom of cinema, capturing the soul of this artist and its stirring cultural text through an intense conversation with Joshy Joseph.

4) Mizo Soundscapes (22 min)

Mizo Soundscapes is a visual - visceral -aural journey through a phase in Mizo History.

Joshy Joseph will present his films and will take part in the discussions.