[Reader-list] The Wager on Cinema: Screening 5-Placebo

[The Sarai Programme]

The Sarai Programme invites you for the screening of Abhay Kumar's
'Placebo' on Thursday, 11th August, 2016, 6.00pm.

The screening will be held at 29 Rajpur Road, Civil Lines, CSDS

The respondents for this film are Rahul Roy and Ravi Vasudevan

About 'The Wager on Cinema'-
How do we estimate the value, aesthetic force, and meaning of cinema today?
As media experience, technological change has transformed it beyond
recognition, its material forms altered by analog and digital video
formats, and the modes of circulating, viewing, accessing cinema and making
it have expanded exponentially. And yet, the dream and ambition of cinema
as we have known it has not dissipated, the desire to congregate audiences
to participate in a distinct world of experience, whether to excite, amuse,
to move or to solicit reflection and engagement, to bear witness and to
mobilize.

For us at Sarai, the wager on cinema carries high stakes. It means renewing
a pact with a bid to explore experience, to take film technique as a
vehicle of the unexpected, making connections that take us aback, working
out strategies to navigate media's capacity to deceive - to sting the
audience as much as expose secretive acts - through a forensic analytics,
through ethical calibration, but also playfully, ironically. For us, such a
wager also places emphasis on process, how things are done, how techniques
are used, what evidence is presented, what judgments are made, how publics
are engaged, framing the cinema as an act of research. In this series,
Sarai will screen films to shift focus, to conjure up unusual images and
sounds, novel techniques and subject matter, and will organise discussions
with practitioners, researchers and an interested public to renew our
investment in the cinema, to capture what it means in our times.

Synopsis, 'Placebo' dir. Abhay Kumar, 96 mins
Pressure reaches breaking point at India's toughest medical school ; a film
maker goes undercover in this prestigious institution to follow the
ambitious doctors of tomorrow, wrestling with lifelong dreams, pain and
healing - as the school's administration stands accused of turning a blind
eye to an unfolding tragedy

Abhay Kumar is a filmmaker, TED fellow and teacher from India. In 2011,
Abhay's hybrid short animation film “Just that Sort of Day” became the
first Indian animation film to compete at the Tribeca Film Festival, went
onto win best film at Busan, New York Indian Film Festival, Regensburg, 200
screenings at the Centre Pompidou Museum, Paris and picked up a National
Award in India. In 2014, Abhay's hybrid feature documentary ‘Placebo”
premiered at IDFA, winning a jury nomination award for best debut. In 2016,
Abhay was selected for the Berlinale Talent Campus as part of the Berlin
International Film Festival

Rahul Roy is a filmmaker whose films have travelled across the globe to
various documentary film festivals and have won several prestigious awards.

Ravi Vasudevan is Professor at CSDS and co-founder of The Sarai Programme

Tea will be served at 5.30pm

The trailer of the film can be found at the following link-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrdLPrZzjh8

For Further details check our Facebook event page.
https://www.facebook.com/events/623666321132538/?notif_t=plan_user_associated&notif_id=1470379357940201