So I just returned from the Mumbai Film Festival. I had been attending this lovely treat for cinephiles like me for the past two years. This year was amazingly terrible.
To begin with, the management was just as average as the previous years. I don't understand how they could fuck up after having fucked up before. I almost lost my life in a stampede for a film. This is the level of our peoples' stupidity. And to top it all up, there were ads being played. ADS. Are you fucking kidding me? Ads in a film festival? That too ads that are 15 minute long and eat up the time of the film? Seriously, someone needs to be spanked on the ass with a white hot iron rod. After this, I know for sure that I want to destroy the ad industry as horribly as I can.
But that isn't even the wort part of the festival. The worst were the people, the pseudo-cinephiles. Honestly, the crowds were fanatics in the last few years; people who would begin a riot if there was a disturbance. This year, the crowd was the biggest disturbance I faced. Not one film was watched without a phone ringing, or someone chatting on WhatsApp. People were talking, people were laughing at the Korean accents in a film (nothing funny, in fact they laughed at a guy dying just because it sounded funny), when I voiced my opinion against the annoyingly horrifying ads that they were playing, this same crowd asked me to shut up, defending the management's mistakes. This is what this festival has come to.
The movies were decent, the management was average, but the audience was worthy of hell. It is, I believe the fault of the management. Had they not commercialised their festival so much, it would still be catering to the niches that respect cinema, and not to the Facebook-WhatsApp generation that disrespects the film, the filmmaker and true-blood cinephiles.
Hope this festival never happens again. The crowds did not deserve it. And for those who actually deserve it, they cannot enjoy it as long as these assholes keep disturbing them. So what's the point anyways?
May the Darkness consume you in your Light, MAMI! You were a big disappointment.
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