tiNai Ecofilm Festival 2015 & National Conference on Ecocinema
The second edition of tiNai Ecofilm Festival (TEFF) 2015 and National Conference on Ecocinema recently concluded in BITS Pilani K. K. Birla Goa Campus. Spread over three days, from 08 to 10 October, 2015, TEFF 2015 screened twenty ecofilms, conducted a national conference with twenty paper presentations along with two workshops by eminent filmmakers and activists. The inaugural of the festival and the conference was held on 08 October 2015 at 06.30 p.m. at the auditorium of BITS Pilani, K.K. Birla Goa Campus.
This edition of TEFF also had a National Conference on Ecocinema on the theme, ”Celebrating Landscapes and Waterscapes.” Prof. Salma Monani, Gettysburg College, USA, and Rachel Carson Fellow, Munich, was the Chief Guest and keynote (Titled: Ecocinema Studies: Past, Present and Future) speaker for the National Seminar while Nandan Saxena and Kavita Bahl, National Award winning fillmmakers were the Chief Guests for the Film Festival. The inaugural film was Dammed directed by Nandan Saxena and Kavita Bahl after which there was a lively and meaningful interaction with the filmmakers. The discussion was moderated by Mr. Solano Jose Savio Da Silva, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS Pilani K. K. Birla Goa Campus.
An international ecodocumentary competition was organized as part of the festival for three categories: Indian Short Ecodocumentary, Indian Feature Ecodocumentary and International Ecodocumentary. Shifting Undercurrents, Directed by Rita Banerji, won the Best Indian Short Ecodocumentary award followed by Chintan Gohil’s A Commons Sense (Best Indian Short Ecodocumentary – Runner-up), The Red Data Book: An Appendix (Best Indian Feature Ecodocumentary) by Sreemith Sekar, Shrinking Shores ((Best Indian feature Ecodocumentary – Runner-up) by Ashish Rao, a French film, Jikoo, a wish (Best International Ecodocumentary) by Christophe Leroy and Adrien Camus and the Taiwanese film, The Lost Sea (Best International Ecodocumentary – Runner-up) by Hung Chun-Hsiu. 82 films were entered in all the categories from various countries and across India.
Click here to see the posters of the award-winning films
The conference saw around twenty papers presented by academicians and research scholars across India and Portugal. A workshop on ”Photography and Digital Filmmaking” supported by Sony India was conducted by Nandan Saxena and Kavita Bahl on the 08 & 09 October, 2015 and a workshop on ”Documentary as a tool for Social Change” was conducted by Saraswati Kavula, a filmmaker, organic farmer and activist, on 10 October 2015. More than 200 young ecoenthusiasts and students from across India participated in the event.
The directors of the festival are Prof. Meenakshi Raman, Head, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Dr. Rayson K. Alex, Assistant Professor, Department of HSS, BITS Pilani, K.K. Birla Goa Campus and the chief coordinator of the conference was Dr. Reena Cheruvalath, Assistant Professor, Department of HSS at BITS Goa.
Click for more photographs of the festival and conference
