18th edition of DocedgeKolkata held virtually in 3 phases

The 18^th edition of DocedgeKolkata, a documentary incubation-cum-pitching forum for Indian and Asian filmmakers, was held virtually from 7 to 30 May in three phases.

The annual platform seeks to help documentary films reach a global audience.

The forum held a week-long project development workshop to imbue the selected projects with meaningful creative inputs so that the stories could be told with empathy, engagement and professional presentation. The workshop included narrative and visual labs where story ideas were enhanced.

Projects on personal stories, cultural traditions reflecting contemporary society and humanitarian issues appealed to representatives of global institutions such as BBC UK, Cinephil, Phoenix TV, IDFA, Baltic Sea Docs, Elda Productions, Visions du Réel, Tokyo Docs, DMZ Industry, The Whickers, VFS Films, NHK Enterprises, GFMI, Taskovski Films, Docaviv, UpNorth Film, Seesaw Pictures and many more and garnered positive responses.

This year, the projects were developed by 11 internationally acclaimed mentors — Egil Håskjold Larsen, Audrius Stonys, Claudio Hughes, Gary Kam, Iikka Vehkalahti, Ingrid Falch, Jane Mote, John Webster, Ollie Huddleston, Ryota Kotani and Sean McAllister — which resulted in 24 work-in-progress projects from India, Japan, China, Korea, Bangladesh, Turkey, the UK, Iran and Indonesia.

A global panel of 36 decision-makers from 24 countries successfully conducted 316 one-on-one feedback meetings within four days with 24 project teams.

The virtual event also saw the organization of Master Class: Stories for Social Change — Optimizing Impact presented by Global Media Makers, USA. The session was a conversation about filmmaking as a tool for social impact.

The forum announced 10 awards such as the Dhaka DocLab award for South Asian and Work-In-Progress categories, cash prizes from the Global Film and Media Initiative, Sweden, and The Whickers, UK, and participation awards from fora like IDFA, Griffith University, Tokyo Docs, Baltic Sea Docs, DMZ Industry and Doaviv.

Two teams of first-time filmmakers Ragini Nath and Chinmoy Sonowal from India and Sun Guohu and Shi Xiaoan from China received the opportunity to participate in a special masterclass by Griffith Film School with two projects Our Hoolocks (India) and Put On Your Boots And The Show Begins (China).

Our Hoolocks talks about a local community trying to conserve a fast-vanishing ape species. Put On Your Boots And The Show Begins tells the tale of twin sisters learning Yue Opera and striving to take centre stage while facing pressure from all sides.

Projects such as Outsider by Kanishka Sonthalia and Siddesh Shetty, which follows the journey of an Indian-Nepali boy living a bohemian life in a remote Himalayan village; Kunchok by Ashok Meena and Suruchi Sharma, which documents the efforts of an ageing man to save archaic water-mills in his village; and Letters To My Grandma by Divya Kharnare, a personal ode to the filmmaker's grandmother while tracing the last 100 days of her life against the backdrop of the pandemic, were praised.