Kotiganahalli Ramaiah 
President of Adima

Usually, the moonscape of the Shathashrunga Mountains near Kolar is the haunt of weekend rock climbers and couples from Bangalore willing to make the 68km trip for a few hours of privacy. However, starting January, an entirely different set of people will hoist themselves up the volcanic boulders of this range – the Adima Film Club will screen the works of Kurosawa, Polanski, Kubrick, Godard, Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut, Ray and Kasaravalli to rural audiences, and later engage them in discussions about the films, in Kannada.

“The idea is to get a group of 50 to 100 people who can come every month,” said Chalam Bennurakar, filmmaker and coordinator of the film club, when we met him at his home in HBR Layout. It isn’t just the unreal locale that sets this film club apart, he told us. “I have been involved with the Bangalore Film Society and many other film clubs,” Bennurakar said. “My experience has been mainly with urban audiences. With Adima we are trying to reach people from the rural and Dalit background. To see what it would be like to discuss these world classics with them.”

At the heart of any film club is a decent-sized library of movies, and Bennurakar and his friends have already cleared this first hurdle. “We have 8,000 movies in our database,” Bennurakar said, pointing to eight one terabyte discs neatly lined up in a bookshelf behind him. “These are mostly world classics starting from movies by the Lumière brothers and up to recent Korean and Taiwanese cinema. Most of these were sourced from a group of film lovers based in Berlin called OXDB. It completely violates all copyright laws,” he added. “We think of ourselves as a copy-left organisation.”

The club will begin proceedings next month with a world cinema festival held over two days, where apart from a selection of international films, movies like Pather Panchali by Satyajit Ray, Subarnarekha by Ritwik Ghatak and Samskara by Pattabhirama Reddy will be screened. “In the ’70s, ’80s and the early ’90s there was a lot of energy in the cultural arena. Literature, theatre, cinema and politics fed off each other, and it was a dynamic atmosphere,” Bennurakar said. “A lot of new experiments were happening. There used to be regular film appreciation courses and festivals all over the state, where you could find thousands of people attending. Even small children, who were cattle grazers, would talk about Rashomon. Unfortunately, that kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore. Adima is an effort to renew ourselves and get out of the limbo that we have gotten into.”

The film club is one of many activities organised by the Adima Sanghatane, a trust whose stated objective is to seek the “lost wisdom of our past”. The trust organises Hunnime Hadu (songs of the full moon) – a meeting every full moon night where people come to the Shathashrunga mountains to read poetry, watch a play, listen to music and share a simple meal.

When we caught up with the president of the trust, Kotiganahalli Ramaiah, in the shadow of a large boulder, he was smoking a cigarette, sipping on coffee and breathing fire. “Earlier the British and the Mughals used to cut off the hands of craftsmen. Similarly, cultural practices, especially of the suppressed classes in society were also deliberately submerged,” he fumed. “But the roots of this culture are still healthy today, though below the surface. Ours is a collective search for these roots. This movement is what we call Adima.”

Adima Film Club will not be restricted by the boundaries that typically limit film clubs in cities, according to Ramaiah. “Film societies in cities tend to cater to urban sensibilities,” he said. “We, however, are looking to engage with all kinds of people – those living in villages, school students, coolies, pickpockets, professionals, the rich and the poor.” Providing these people with access to world cinema is a first step. Ultimately the film club hopes to nurture a new sensibility and aesthetic.

But it will be nothing like the Navya movement in Kannada literature, which, in turn, influenced the new wave in Kannada cinema, Ramaiah was quick to add. “That was a hypocritical and irresponsible movement,” he said. “You are welcome to read and digest Kafka, Camus and Sartre. But after that if you churn out carbon copies of what you have read, you cannot call it a movement. The new

wave fizzled out because it was monopolised by a few individuals. They only wanted to glorify their own constructs and that is why they made cinema. That is why it didn’t grow and it doesn’t exist today.”