Senior Rediff.com Contributor Aseem Chhabra is director of the New York Indian Film Festival, an entertainment writer and author of Irrfan Khan: The Man, The Dreamer, The Star. You can e-mail the author at aseem.chhabra@gmail.com
'One's country is the best place to live, no matter what problems, what difficulties.' 'My country is where I can breathe, where I can find the reason to live, and where I can find the strength to create.'
'She was brave. She didn't care a hoot. And India was not the strongest of nations as it is now.'
'She was brave. She didn't care a hoot. And India was not the strongest of nations as it is now.'
'It is something that he always wanted to do and he has achieved phenomenal success in doing it.'
'There have been multiple cases of people being shot for pulling into someone's driveway because they made a wrong turn or ringing the wrong bell because they made a mistake.' 'That is also the pathway to fascism.' 'The way you divide people is to make them fear each other. Then a strong man can come in and say, "I will protect you".'
'I realised why the farmers and the rural folks are going for Trump. They are so insecure and vulnerable that anybody who is throwing a line of hope to them, they seize it.'
This weekend, we lost Diane Keaton, that piece of American heart, Hollywood's darling hummingbird. Thank God she is still alive in her films. Aseem Chhabra on the Hollywood star he was in love with.
'What is it about the institution of faith that makes somebody get a sense of impunity, that they believe they can get away with anything?'
'They are clueless about the man on the currency notes.' 'They have been fed with WhatsApp forwards, so either Gandhi is vilified or deified. There's nothing in between.'
'For the longest time, he was not an activist.' 'He was just trying to build his own self-identity, self-respect and ambition.'
With his killer smile, the sex symbol image, Robert Redford would go beyond just being an actor, remembers Aseem Chhabra.
The festival's People's Choice Award, voted by the audience, is a strong indication of films that can eventually be nominated and even win Oscars. Twelve of the last 15 People's Choice winners have received Best Picture Oscar nominations.
'When you are a pioneer and someone who's put on a pedestal, but then the pedestal gets dusty, people don't look at the statue anymore.' 'They would say, 'Yes, yes, of course I know Bimal Roy. He made Do Bigha Zamin.'.'
'On our first day at the Kumbh Mela, there was a fire and shook our confidence. 'There must have been a few crore people there.' 'How do we place the camera in between them?'
'So my question was, 'What is it that you are proud of? What have you achieved? What is your contribution?' 'He had no answer.'
'You need the drishti, the experience. I am beginning to see things differently.'
'If you look around the world at people of colour, religion, caste, sexuality or any of the marginalised communities, we are always talking in numbers.' 'We are always assigning them a statistic.' 'That is an easy way to assuage your urban guilt. Because you hide your apathy with hollow sympathy.' 'We are, in a way, making them invisible.'
'These characters have huge spirits and they are fighting something that is much bigger than them.' 'The attempt was to portray how they navigate their lives, to retain that spirit and not let it die.'
'In a world which is full of categories, hatred and ideologies, there was this basic decency.'
The four-day CIFF was packed with so many other new projects, like Radhika Apte's first directorial effort Koyta, with Vikramaditya Motwane as the producer, Venkatesh Maha's Ko Ko Ko, Jeo Baby's Punishment and Shonali Bose's Black Mountain Monpa.
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