What It Takes to Pull Off The Brahmaputra Valley Film Festival (BVFF)

It is fitting that a film festival takes place in the premises of a film studio — almost as though a cycle has been completed, from the making to the spectating. But, of course, none of the films shown at the Brahmaputra Valley Film Festival (BVFF) were actually shot at the Jyoti Chitraban Film Studio in Guwahati, Assam — named after the “Father of Assamese Cinema”. If there is a circle, it is merely symbolic. But symbols have a way of keeping things afloat. 

The largest film festival in the North-East, the BVFF is now in its tenth year with the recently-concluded ninth edition — the pandemic shifted things around, and BVFF skipped a year. For a festival to be around so long is itself a feat, especially in a city where there are few theatres and fewer spaces for independent cinema.  

There is a tightrope act at play here, where on the one hand they invite mainstream Hindi and Tamil cinema stalwarts like Rajkumar Hirani, Boman Irani, Imtiaz Ali, Vishal Bhardwaj, Nagesh Kukunoor, Gauri Shinde, Rajkumar Rao, Shakun Batra, Prakash Jha, and this year Tigmanshu Dhulia and Aishwarya Lekshmi. These actors and directors hold masterclasses or serve on juries, interacting with the local filmmakers and students, watching their films.

On the other hand, BVFF wants to become a “gateway to the North-East”, to platform and celebrate voices from these states. 

Sometimes it feels like these pursuits are running on parallel tracks. The aim BVFF has set for itself is to make the tracks meet. 

Unfolding over four days, the BVFF is helmed by festival director Tanushree Hazarika, and a small core team — a powerful group of people, from Bjorn De Niese, the Managing Director of Mayfair Elixir serving as the Communication Director of BVFF, to Pallavi Chumki Barua, an advocate-on-record for the Supreme Court serving as the Creative Director, and Karma Paljor, the editor-in-chief of East Mojo as the Publicity Director. There is a sense of influential, local people pooling in their social and financial capital to somehow put this together. Hazarika calls it a “passion project”.

Hazarika was pushed to start this film festival in 2013 after a conversation with filmmaker Reema Kagti, a close friend, who wondered why there was no film festival in the city. An excitable entrepreneur, Hazarika, who had never attended nor run a film festival before this, pooled sponsors and pulled a team together, while Kagti brought in Zoya Akhtar and Dibakar Banerjee for the opening edition of the festival. “Because we were in the industry, we had clients and advertisers, so we had to literally use our personal connections, drag them in and say — hey, participate here,” Hazarika recalls.  

Back then, the festival only ran for two days, with award categories only for short films exclusively from the North-East. Since then, the profile has significantly expanded — not just the number of days and films, but the awards, too; they now award feature films, documentary films, and best director. This year, they had over 150 submissions, of which around 80 were films originating in the North-East. This year, they also had over 300 delegates sign up for a fee of ₹ 500. The films themselves are free to attend — the delegate pass gives you additional access to the industry sessions and masterclasses. As you can imagine, to be profitable is the unrealised horizon here. At best, they break even with the sponsorships. “There have been years where we have invested on our own,” Hazarika notes.

Like any festival, BVFF has jostled with the tension between growing bigger and deeper. They are still struggling with curation — the films from the North-East, which make up half the curation, are not nearly on par with the rest of the lineup, many unable to extricate themselves from thematising their films — while championing voices that can build on the connections they make here, over the course of the festival, through intimate huddles, smoking reprieves, late-night cruises on the Brahmaputra, and over pork thalis. The most celebrated filmmaker at the festival, though, still remained Kenny Basumatary, with kids, youths, and even adults stopping him every few steps for a selfie with the man who made the Local Kung Fu films, which earned a cult following on its own terms. His film Bibo Binanao (My Three Sisters) took the Best Feature Film award. The lifetime achievement award went to Pranjal Saikia, an Assamese actor. BVFF wants to affirm the local, while building it, too.

Hazarika is clear. On the one hand, she wants people from the industry to come to Guwahati, so they can pull talent from here back to Mumbai — she gives the example of local filmmakers who were able to assist on Pink, produced by Ronnie Lahiri, an advisor to the festival. On the other hand, she hopes people come to the city to shoot, tapping into the talent they have acquainted themselves with — here, she gives the example of Krishna DK, who when shooting in Kaziranga, pulled at the contacts he made while at the festival. This year, they brought in Smriti Kiran, previously the artistic director of MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, to curate the industry sessions, to further increase their profile. 

The film festival, after all, is a space to create both a film-watching and a film-making culture. Any festival that tackles both, BVFF included, is a welcome addition to the landscape. To have Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light and Rima Das’ Village Rockstars 2 alongside greener, unvarnished voices in the hope that the chasm will narrow, somehow, over time. Hope, like symbols, has a way of keeping things afloat.