Today being the European day of languages, I hope you will excuse me attempting to write essentially the same post in English, Galician and Castellano (please let me know of any embarrassing errors!). This is partly to support Antonia Mochan’s idea of a day of multilingual blogging, partly to note Rabindranath Tagore’s quest for his writings (mainly in his native Bengali) to cross linguistic boundaries and as a sign of respect to any Galician and Spanish readers.
I should begin by thanking Enrique Nicanor, Director of the Ourense International Film Festival in Galicia, Spain, for including a ‘Homage to Tagore‘ section in this year’s festival to mark Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary, in conjunction with the Tagore Library of Ourense founded by José Paz. It is one of the first, fairly comprehensive tributes to Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary, which UNESCO is marking in 2011.
The programme for the section is as follows:
Saturday, 2 October
21:30-midnight Opening ceremony, during which Kaberi will perform two Tagore dances to inaugurate the ‘Homage to Tagore’ section – Auditorio Municipal
Sunday, 3 October
13:00-14:00 Tribute to Tagore, with José Paz, founder of the Tagore Library of Ourense, at which Kaberi and I will give an illustrated presentation about Tagore’s journey from poetry to dance, including live performances – Centro Cultural Deputación Ourense
Monday, 4 October
20:00-22:00 Premiere of the Spanish version of Shyama (which has been translated with the help of our friend Carlos Moreno-Leguizamon), introduced by José Paz, Kaberi and me – Teatro Principal
Tuesday, 5 October
16:30-18:30 Masterclass: Shyama & the digital revolution, at which I will be explaining how our film version of Tagore’s classic ‘dance-drama’ (which is perhaps one of the first ‘digital end-to-end’ films) is taking advantage of the production, global distribution and promotion opportunities created by the digital revolution to raise international awareness of Tagore and the dance form created by Tagore towards the end of his life – Centro Cultural Deputación Ourense
17:00-19:00 Screening of Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (The lonely wife) based on Tagore’s Nashtanir (The broken nest) – Teatro Principal
Wednesday, 6 October
17:00-18:15 Screening of Satyajit Ray’s Monihara (from Teen Kanya) based on the short story by Tagore – Teatro Principal
Thursday, 7 October
17:00-19:30 Screening of Satyajit Ray’s Ghare baire (The home and the world) based on the novel by Tagore – Teatro Principal
Friday, 8 October
17:00-17:30 Tagore-style tree-planting ceremony (Brikkhoropon) led by Kaberi, who will be teaching the steps for the procession to a group of dancers from the Escuela de Teatro y Baile de Ourense
23:00-00:30 Screening of the Spanish version of Shyama – Cinebox 8
Saturday, 9 October
17:00-19:00 Screening of Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (The lonely wife) based on Tagore’s Nashtanir (The broken nest) – Teatro Principal
17:00-18:30 Screening of the Spanish version of Shyama – Cinebox 8
20:00-22:30 Screening of Satyajit Ray’s Ghare Baire (The home and the world) based on the novel by Tagore – Teatro Principal
For those who note the absence of Satyajit Ray’s 1961 documentary Rabindranath Tagore, made for the 100th birth anniversary celebrations (like the Teen Kanya trilogy), we weren’t able to locate a good quality version of the film which could be projected at the festival … so far. If you can help us find one, please let me know.
The nearest airports to Ourense are Porto (which is served by various international airlines, including Easyjet and Ryanair), Vigo and Santiago de Compostela (which have mainly domestic flights from other parts of Spain).
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[…] I wrote in my previous post, our film Shyama was featured in a special section dedicated to the 150th birth anniversary of […]
To be fair, Shyama was shown at the Kolkata Film Festival last year and I did see this article about the Tagore films being shown at this year’s Kolkata Film Festival to mark the 150th birth anniversary. See my post on ‘Shyama at the Kolkata Film Festival‘.
I’ve written a post about how our Tagore-related activities during the Ourense Film Festival were received there. We were very impressed to see that many Spanish speakers have a deep reverence for Tagore and his work, even today. It is remarkable that Professor Paz has built up an extensive library of over 30,000 books (all catalogued, by the way) by or related to Tagore in a variety of languages.
The credit for the variety of Tagore-related activities in the Ourense section goes to Enrique Nicanor, the Director of the Ourense Film Festival. Bringing Shyama, the Ray films, Professor Paz and us together to create this Tagore section was his vision. As he told us when he proposed it in Cannes earlier in the year, it would be more rounded than just having a series of screenings of Tagore-related films.