Non-fiction movies are in the bucket

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Non-fiction movies are in the bucket

Documentary films are eligible for State Film Awards. Asking none other than the people who have been denied State Film Awards over the years because what they have done is a documentary film. The last date for nominations for the State Film Awards has been announced. The deadline is February 10. Documentary films have been excluded this year as per the unchanging tradition like every year.

What is the reason, the film academy always has only one answer. Documentary films are considered alongside television awards. What a strange argument. If that’s how documentaries are treated, there’s only one question to ask the academy. How many television channels are making documentaries in this Kerala today?

And if so, are any television channels in Malayalam willing to air a feature length movie from outside, other than their respective channels’ own productions today? The duration of the broadcasts is only twenty or twenty-five minutes. Beyond that, even the Academy has assumed that a documentary film is something made to be shown on television.

These kinds of questions are being asked by none other than some filmmakers who have been banned from time to time for making documentary films.

They argue that here in Kerala, the government and the film academy are discriminating against documentary films like nowhere else in the world. Why are these films being overlooked for awards? Isn’t documentary something that belongs to the category of cinema? Are only fiction films and superstar films considered cinema?

It is natural to make such comparisons on the part of the audience. Because for most of the audience, cinema is just entertainment material, but the government and the film academy are going with the same common sense, it must be questioned.

All over the world, when films are considered for awards, documentaries are often included along with them. Needless to say, even in India, such films are being considered for national awards.

Ramdas Kadavallur, the director of the documentary film ‘Soil’, said that the elite treatment of the academy and the government should be corrected.

Most of that recording has been done in the name of documentary films. Even if it is considered for the award, it will probably be the government promotion documentary films that do not cause any trouble to the government. Even with all those loopholes, it is most important that documentary films are considered in the category of films.

When such a film culture is formed, it can form film fans outside of fiction films.

When Ramdas raised this issue as an invitee at the open forum of IDSFFK where ‘Mann’ was screened, there was great acceptance from the audience, and the chairman of the film academy, Kamal, who was in the audience at that time, promised to take this matter into consideration and correct it with the government.

But today the chairman changed and a new chairman came. All the promises turned out to be just promises. When the state award comes again, documentary films are out of the picture. If Ramdas’s argument is relevant in this matter, considering cinema as a work of art, what elitism is there only for fiction films..? Is the academy’s policy that fiction films are porridge on a plate and non-fiction films in a bowl?

CONTENT HIGHLIGHT: KERALA STATE AWARD ISSUES

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