ANTARA BOSE
Jamshedpur, Nov 23: The annual short film festival ‘Shorts’ will provide a platform for upcoming filmmakers for the 15th consecutive year.
Organised by the Society for Promotion of Professional Excellence (SPPE) and Kolkata-based Take 5 Communications, it is back in its original offline format after online versions in 2020 and 2021 owing to Covid-19 restrictions. Shorts will be organised on Nov 26 and 27 at the Centre for Excellence in Jamshedpur.
Started in 2008, Shorts began as an experiment to offer a platform for short films to local budding filmmakers. However, with positive responses year after year, the event became an integral part of Jamshedpur. Over the years, the film festival has showcased creative works of professional, budding and student filmmakers from all over the country and also from abroad in the process captivating the minds of film buffs of Jamshedpur and offering them an opportunity to come across a range of short films both national and international.
“The focus has been on budding filmmakers from Jamshedpur and giving them a platform to reach out to their target audience. The results have shown that many of these newcomers have turned into professional filmmakers and today are working in big metros like Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore. This is the real success of Shorts,” said the director of Take 5 Communications, Tathagata Bhattacherjee.
In its 15th year, the film festival will offer a unique bouquet of smartly crafted short films contributing towards meaningful cinema. Twenty films ranging from three minutes to 30 minutes would be screened in this edition. The films will be in Hindi, English, and Bengali and some are silent films. Apart from Jamshedpur, there are films from Mumbai and Kolkata and an international entry by a student filmmaker from London Film Academy. Noteworthy also is that a short film by national award-winning filmmaker Ashoke Viswanathan features this year which would be the opening film of the Festival.