Jafar Panahi, one of the contemporary masters of World Cinema from Iran had been imposed with a 20 year ban from film making by the Iranian government in 2007. But Mr. Panahi still managed to make three films viz This Is Not A Film (2011), Closed Curtain (2013) and Taxi Tehran (2015).
And all these three films further explore the docu-fiction style where the lines between documentary and fiction blur so subtly and beautifully. Filmmakers world over, quite a few greats, especially the greats (Orson Welles for instance) have always tried this puzzling technique, trying to throw at the audience something so real that it gets supremely dramatic, otherwise called turning the camera around.Anyways coming to our film - A Love Letter to Cinema, is in a sense a rip off of Taxi Tehran. Panahi's Taxi is about how Panahi disguised himself as a cab driver in Tehran, mounted a camera on his dashboard and went around town for a day, a few of the passengers recognise him, many don't. Panahi's ban and other legal constraints in this scenario kind of push him to make this film in disguise and a camera pointed at life, shooting whatever walks into it.The exciting thing for us when we thought about it, is to put some sort of constraint upon ourselves for the film to look like a blur between what is real and what is staged. And the idea that whatever happens, the camera will never leave the car was the constraint we've imposed upon ourselves and we let the people/actors talk, say whatever, do whatever and the result is the best film we've made so far. Hope you guys love it as much as we do.
Organizer
Rohit/Sasi
Camp Sasi (screen writer, director, producer & actor)
Started off with working in corporate films, Ad films and TV shows, theidea has always been to make films in ultra low budgets, one reasonbeing that a lot of my ideas seemed alien and un-cinema like to a lot ofthe potential producers I've tried pitching ideas to. Their lack ofunderstanding of the technology and also the fact that larger set ups kill the spontaneity an actor can bring to a script. Been struggling to get projects together and finishing them, in 2013 things changed with the
docu-fiction called Sheesh Mahal, a film based around a film festival and ever since I have been more confident in the methods I've always
believed in. In the middle of three features right now - Sheesh Mahal,
Banjara Sangam and A Love Letter to Cinema (the Hyderabad Trilogy)
and incidentally the third was the first to hit the finishing mark and we've been previewing it in Hyderabad for the past month.
Rohit Penumatsa (screen writer, director, editor, actor )
Started off by blogging about films and eventually hired by a few websites for film reviews, in the meanwhile I've been making wildly
experimental short films (Marijuana in Smaller Towns, Bricoleur, Dreams
in Digital). Had to quit writing reviews after a while unable to come up with new ways to criticize the same old stuff being produced around. And
after collaborating with Sasi, I've understood that the methods I've been using for zero budget guerrilla shoots of short films can be just as easily adapted to feature films and we've started with the trilogy in 2013 andlife's been hectic from then on with the Trilogy and a million other ideas
along the way.
