Udayan Vajpeyi

Set in the Bengali Renaissance of the 1930s and 1940s. A group of young intellectuals get embroiled in the struggle for Indian independence, sometimes at the expense of their personal lives.

Sea of Lost Time is an allegory set in an undefined time and space, evoking the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, inspired by his characters. A soldier comes back from the dead to a seaside village. He reminisces on the time lost while he was away, like a sea between his past and the dysfunctional present. Through him we discover a motley of characters: a rag-tag musical band, a man locked up inside an abandoned horse stable, his sister, also the soldier’s lover and who has been bemoaning the loss. An impressionistic view of the intertwined lives of those inhabiting imaginary spaces, with an underpinning of social and political metaphors.

A personal video diary film using an audio recording of filmmaker Mani Kaul giving a Dhrupad lesson to poet Udayan Vajpeyi.

How do the vicissitudes of contemporary notions of nationhood alter our relationship with cultural patrimony? It’s a question obliquely suggested by Amit Dutta’s latest film. As a camera explores the architecture of a museum, we hear a description of a painting we never see. Eventually, we leave the building behind and examine the remains of a temple, explored to weather and war. Sensual and rigourous, The Game of Shifting Mirrors reaffirms Dutta’s place as India’s most accomplished experimental filmmaker -- Michael Sicinski