ABOUT US
our TEACHERS
Our Mentor
KUMAR SHAHANI
KUMAR SHAHANI
Kumar Shahani is a noted Indian film director and screenwriter, best known for his parallel cinema films, Maya Darpan (1972) and Khayal Gatha (1989) and Kasba (1990). Due to his dedication to formalism, and with the reputation of his first feature, Maya Darpan being considered among Indian cinema's first formalist film, he is frequently grouped by critics and film enthusiasts alongside similar stylistic filmmakers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Jacques Rivette. He has also worked with French Film maker Robert Bresson.
SANDEEP CHATTERJEE
The National Award winning director of Sundar Jeebon (2002), Sandeep Chatterjee is a film-maker and teacher of cinema whose work spans nearly 25 years. In the late eighties, Sandeep quit studying science because he loved images too much. He traveled to the fabled Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, of which he is a distinguished alumnus, and was head of the Department of Direction and Screenwriting. His current assignment came on the back of decades of work impressive for both breadth and depth. Apart from Sundar Jeebon, a film based on the fiction writing of the iconic Bengali poet Jibananda Das that won the President’s medal, Sandeep has made influential films like Raat koto holo, which have been screened at different festivals and film schools. He has taught in film schools and has conducted workshops/lecture sessions in India and abroad.
ANJUM RAJABALI
He is a veteran Indian screenwriter and teacher. He has written films like Drohkaal (1994), Ghulam (1998), The Legend of Bhagat Singh (2002) and Raajneeti (2010). He is also known for his leadership and lobbying for the rights of Indian screenwriters, as a senior activist of the Screenwriters Association, India. He is the Head of Screenwriting at Whistling Woods as well as the former Honorary Head of Screenplay Writing at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), a course that he founded in 2004. Apart from being a script consultant on several films, he also conducts workshops, seminars, and conferences on screenwriting.
R. V. RAMANI
FTII alumni known for his unique independent functioning as a Documentary Filmmaker. One of the first to explore the potential of the digital camera to explore images from life. He, too, has influenced several generations of film students with his observant eye. Ramani is currently a member of faculty at the Ambedkar University in New Delhi.
SUDEEP CHATTERJEE
Director of photography, whose recent work speaks for itself, and includes films like Bajirao Mastani, Chak de India, Dhoom 3, Guzarish, Baby & Chatushkon. His work is both popular and critically acclaimed. His awards include: two successive National Awards, the Filmfare Award and the IIFA Award.
AMITABH CHAKRABORTY
Amitabha is an ace editor and a National Award Winning Film Maker. He is an alumnus of FTII, Pune who is respected for his Art-house cult films like Kaal Abhirati, Bishar Blues and Cosmic Sex which has been critically acclaimed in India as well as other countries. Amitabha has also conducted classes and workshops in the prime film schools of the country over more than two decades. He has been a revered mentor for several generations of film students.
SHUDDHABRATA SENGUPTA
Sengupta is co-founder, along with Monica Narula and Jeebesh Bagchi, of the Raqs Media Collective (www.raqsmediacollective.net) Since its inception in 1992, the members of the Collective have worked in a wide range of forms and formats. In their words, “they create installations, make videos, photographs, print and online works, play with archival traces, make exhibitions and art interventions in public spaces, write essays, enact lecture-performances, engage with pedagogical procedures, edit books, design events, and foster collaborations.”
RANJANI MAZUMDAR
Ranjani is Professor of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her publications focus on urban cultures, popular cinema, gender, and the cinematic city. She is the author of Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (2007) and co-editor with Neepa Majumdar of the forthcoming Wiley Blackwell Companion to Indian Cinema. She has also worked as a documentary filmmaker and her productions include Delhi Diary 2001 and The Power of the Image (co-directed). She has been a Marie Curie European Union Fellow in Indian Film at the University of Westminster (London); a Fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Centre for Historical Studies, Princeton University, a British Academy (ESRC) Fellow, an ICSSR Visiting Fellow at the Maison des Sciences de l’homme in Paris, and Visiting Faculty at the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. Her current research focuses on globalization and film culture, and the intersection of technology, travel, design, and colour in 1960s Bombay Cinema
ASHWIN RAMANATHAN
Ashwin has over a decade of experience in teaching film editing in the digital domain. His works include films like Marma Desam (1996-98), Kaadal Pagadai (1996-98), Mitr, My Friend (National Award for Best Editing 2002), Dance Like a Man (2003), Julie Ganapathy (2003), Phir Milenge (2004). He was also the Assistant Professor, Film Editing at Film & TV Institute of India, Pune (2009 – 2013).
NAMITA NAYAK CHOPRA
Namita is a senior sound designer in the Mumbai Film Industry. Through her illustrious career she has worked in a wide variety of film from 'A' grade bollywood starrers like 1942 A Love Story, Sarfarosh to art-house films like Char Adhyay and Iqbal. In the recent past she has also developed herself as a teacher, author and a creative producer.
ASHEESH PANDYA
Having graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune in 1988, Asheesh has been practicing the art and technique of Sound for films, theatre, music and audio projects. Has recorded, designed and mixed sound for several award winning Indian and international films and has travelled widely with some of the best names in broadcasting industry within and outside his country. Visiting faculty at various prestigious institutions in India, he loves to engage with young minds. His sound workshops, titled 'Happy New Ear', invariably draw full attendance by the students, who've often described them as life changing. A photographer, an occasional poet, a theatre actor, an amateur architect, Asheesh designed the sound scheme and studio for India World Radio and organized a festival of documentaries in his city Gurgaon.
SUBHADEEP SENGUPTA
The National Award Winning autobiographer of Chitra Sutram, Subhadeep has worked on many television programs like 'The Bawls of Bengal' for Doordarshan. He has been part of multiple National Award winning documentaries. Winner of "Best Sound" for the short film "Ghorsawar" dir: Pranabesh Chandra in Pune International Film Festival 2016. He has worked in numerous fiction films of multiple languages. Currently employed as an Assistant Professor in St Xavier's College, Kolkata.
Ranbir Kaleka
Special Session
Ranbir Kaleka (born 1953) is a multi-media artist based in New Delhi. Kaleka was trained at College of Art, Chandigarh, and the Royal College of Art, London. Initially trained as a painter, his work has increasingly animated two-dimensional canvases within experimental film narrative sequences. Kaleka has been exhibited in a range of major international gallery and museums. In 2007, Dr. Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, Senior Judaica curator, Spertus Museum Chicago commissioned Kaleka to make a Holocaust memorial. The site-specific video installation is titled "Consider", an installation consisting of two projections, a painting and an audio narrative of oral testimony from Auschwitz. In 2005 Kaleka showed at the 51st Venice Biennale in the exhibition ‘iCon - India Contemporary’ Co-curated by Julie Evans, Gordon Knox and Peter Nagy. In 2002 Kaleka exhibited at the Kunsthalle, Vienna, Austria in the exhibition Kapital and Karma: Recent Positions in Indian Art. Kaleka was awarded the National Award by the president of India at the 22nd National Exhibition of Art organised by the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1979 in Delhi.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Special Lecture
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has, over his more than fifty years of writing as a poet and essayist, focused resolutely on the 'image' in his poetic works. Beginning in his youth with a strong surrealist streak, his work turned more towards observing, mapping, giving shape and form to the time and place he found himself in. Taking Ezra Pound's credo in 'A few don'ts by an Imagiste' as a starting point, Mehrotra's poetry manages to create bold images out of all those seemingly unimportant and therefore discarded aspects of our lives. Where Mehrotra's poetry shines is when those razor sharp images start cutting into the reader's perceptions.
our students
CTRL
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CiNEMA
2017 Batch
OUR GUESTS & SPECIAL SCREENINGS 2017
Payal Kapadia was invited to screen her Short Film 'Afternoon Clouds' which was also screened at the C annes Film Festival.
Likewise Renu Savant was invited to screen her National Award Winning Short Film 'Aaranyak'
OUR GUESTS & SPECIAL SCREENINGS 2018
Sarthak Bhasin
is invited to screen his diploma film 'Ekaant' which was awarded as the best short fiction film at the TBILISI International Student Film Festival 2018.
The film is set in an unspecified time and space, the film’s protagonist seems to be the only living person in a completely devastated city. He goes about, struggling his way, negotiating the tough settings and trying to survive. When one fine day, out of nowhere, he happens to meet another person. Except that this person looks exactly like him.
