THE FILMS OF LITTLE INDIA: Scene But Not Heard; The Films of the New York Film Festival

Selections at the 1997 New York Film Festival continued the impressive showing made by independent earlier this year at the Oscars. And Lee's film The Ice Storm opened the festival and Spanish director Pedro Almodovar closed it with his Live Flesh. Canadian Atom Egoyan's new The Sweet Hereafter was presented as the centerpiece. Independent films from here and overseas, and films by foreign-born directors in the Hollywood system are getting bigger and finding audiences. Independent films used to be made on minuscule budgets and were technically rough, but now even "independence" is expensive. A number of this year's festival films will be out shortly. Here is a selection. Not since the days of the prolific German director Fassbinder in the 1970s, have there been two films in the same even by one director. Thus, Hong Kong's Wong KarWai's Happy Together and Fallen Angels (a sequel to his earlier Chungking Express) provided ample testimony to the enormous energy and range of the production in the Asian countries. Stylistically laconic and terse, Hana-Bi by Japanese film and TV personality Takeshi Kitano transposed the events of Banana Yashimoto's original Japanese novel to contemporary Hong Kong and mainland China. ACV's festival has been growing by leaps over the last few years. To give younger film enthusiasts a chance to interact with film makers, they organized three master class events with experienced directors: Wayne Wang, [Ang Lee] and [Adoor Gopalakrishnan]. Those at the festival had the good fortune of hearing Gopalkrishnan himself speaking at a master class. He spoke at length and informally answered questions about film making craft, his vocation in the cinema, about the future of his own kind of cinema with the impact of satellite TV and cable, the commercialization of Doordarshan itself, and about the role of the Film Institute where he studied and in whose direction he has had a hand.