About the Festival
As we zoom past Instagram filters, automated editing apps on our phones and countless banal videos on our timeline, we want to relive the magic of analogue film, churning through a projector, evoking its tangible quality. The 16mm Film Festival was conceived with a view of re-connecting with the cinematic medium through it’s celluloid history and present. To foster a growing community.
With year long film engagements at the Harkat Lab, we have been working our way through re-building and supporting an infrastructure for filmmakers and artists who want to work on film. In line with the festival every year, we also facilitate the production of 5 one-minute 16mm films by young filmmakers in India, as part of our ‘Ek-minute Film Competition’.
The 16mm Film Festival is organised by Harkat, a film lab, alternative arts space and boutique film production company based in Mumbai.
Film shares space with leftover lunch boxes, milk, condiments, some things sweet! It can never be just a film fridge; much like our lab space being attached to our kitchen; much like life and the interconnectedness of it all. To have cake in the fridge is like a loaded bank locker for the soul. A film print (a slice of cake) is like a moment in time, private, sometimes paraded publicly, but perhaps best experienced in dark rooms where we feel each other’s presence but can be with ourselves.
With that thought, we announce the 8th edition of our festival — the 16mm film festival, 2024. A festival dedicated to photochemistry. It’s called 16mm but we accept all formats and cross-formats. The festival for us goes deep into our consciousness, and as every year comes to a close and one takes notes on requited/unrequited dreams, it recharges our senses, brings the community together, and is almost like a long stretchy yawn, letting many ideas flow in through the mouth.