Thiruvananthapuram: when the curtains go up at this year’s Fourth International Film Festival at Pori in Finland, Kerala’s own Palakkad will have something to be proud of. For, the festival will be the screening as many as 200 Haiku Films of Insight made by K. V. Vincent, who hails from Palakkad.
Vincent is the Festival Director of Haiku International Little Film Festival and International Documentary Festival, organized by Insight, a creative group in Palakkad.
In what could be termed as unique in the history of international film festivals, these films will be screened continuously as an installation in a separate hall called Valimo over three days of the festival – on November 30, December 1 and December 2.
‘Haiku Films’ of K.V. Vincent are very short films of less than three minutes duration, most of them below one minute. Almost all of them have been shot without prior arrangements and are short records of some transitory moments of surprise that he witnesses in Nature, akin to what could be seen in Haiku poetry. The filmmaker feels that every moment of his encounter with nature fills him with excitement, and it is that excitement he would be sharing with the viewers.
Vincent believes that there is a very fine, sometimes indistinguishable, line that separates ‘documenting’ and story-telling and that the latter is more appealing to the audience. So, he often transforms his ‘documenting’ into ‘story-telling’ by the careful selection and juxtaposing of portions of his video-recordings.
Making people act in front of his camera or using advanced editing techniques to change the original context and character of the documentation are never his means of story-telling. He is convinced that truth is too valuable to sacrifice for the success of a short film and that truth is always stranger than fiction, said an Insight statement.
C.K. Ramakrishnan, Vice President and Office Manager at Insight, has been handling the technical aspects of the film festivals of Insight and has been the editor of most of the films produced by Insight, has done the editing of all the 200 Haiku films of Vincent.
‘Politics’ a film by produced by Manikkoth Madhavadev for Insight and directed by Methil Komankutty, the Secretary of Insight, has also been shortlisted for screening at the International Pori Film Festival.
