Film Festival and Best Film Critic Competition

The film club of GCTE, Thycaud, had presented before the student teachers two short films as a part of "Film Festival & Best Film Critic Competition" on 23rd November 2022 at the UGC hall. The two short films displayed were originally made in Tamil and provided with English subtitles. Both the films, 'Aasai' directed by Sam and 'Tippen Box' by Karthik Gopal are open ended and conclude with notes of hope. 'Aasai' centres around a poor and deprived child Selvam who works in a grocery shop to eke out a living. The setting, much like the hueless life of the child protagonist, is rather dull. The film throws light upon the social issue of child labour only in a peripheral manner with Selvan asserting at one point in his soliloquy that his boss treats him well. Still the treatment meted out to him by the society at large is to be analysed and questioned, given that in the first place, he is made to toil for a living at a very young age. 'Aasai' , as the title suggests, is more about human desires, which may last longer than we imagine them to be. Selvam works towards the realisation of a seemingly simple dream which is to talk to his mother over a telephone since his workplace is far from where his mother is boarded. He willingly burdens himself with delivery errands just to amass coins necessary to make the call. Towards the end of the film, we see him procuring the needed amount to make the call but because it took a long time to get his mother connected on the other end of the telephone, he could not make the much longed-for chat. Despite this attempt being a failure, Selvam does not give in. His perseverance, fortitude and determination to continue his hard work are valuable messages for the viewers.

The second film displayed before us, 'Tippen Box' revolves around a school boy of grade 5 who hails from a wretched background. He is gripped by the shame of not even possessing a good tiffin box which he could carry to his school and share food with his classmates. Yet, he is matured enough to understand the deplorable familial conditions which prevent him from asking his labourer-father to buy a new tiffin box for him. The solution which he comes up with to tackle this predicament is to run to his home from school at noon  to have his lunch at home. However, everytime he returns to school after having lunch, the afternoon session classes would have already begun and he is regularly punished by the teacher for coming late to the class. He is physically tortured by being asked to kneel down on the ground in searing heat of the sun despite him repeatedly  imploring to the teacher to revoke the punishment.  Once when his English teacher promises a tiffin box as a gift for the highest-scoring student of a class test, he works hard for the coveted gift in vain. And as he himself mentions in an essay about his own dream, he 'continues to run'. The film not only unveils the penury in which the  boy's family is caught,  but also imparts the lesson that as teachers we should be considerate to students and try to understand and solve their problems in all possible ways instead of resorting to corporeal punishments for trivial things.

Both the films, though short in duration, were replete with emotional depth and intellectual appeal. They stand out owing to acting rendered by the child protagonists and the manners of depicting societal injustice and deprivation. Following the screening of the two films, review and criticism writing competition was held.