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Ivan Jaigirdar of San Francisco's 3rd I Film Festival
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Ivan Jaigirdar's love of film started early. Growing up, he regularly went to see Neo-Realist films with his dad, a film buff. Jaigirdar attended to UC Berkeley as a business major, but after seeing a Satyajat Ray movie in a class, that was it. He started studying film, going on to get a master’s degree in film studies.
Jaigirdar is putting that degree to good use as artistic director of the 3rd I South Asian International Film Festival. Jaigirdar says this came out of wanting more three-dimensional South Asian images. He and some colleagues started by organizing monthly screenings with themes like Queer South Asians or Representation of Women in South Asia, and the response was so great, they decided to put on a yearly festival. Now in its seventh year, it runs over four days and showcases documentaries like Iron Eaters about men breaking down huge container ships in Bangledesh, and Yes Madam, Sir about India’s first and highest ranking female police officer, Kiran Bedi, along with features like Bombay Summer about three artists in Bombay and Zero Bridge about a young pickpocket in Kashmir. There will also be shorts and lots of directors attending.
With the festival starting on Thursday and plenty of details to take care of, now is about the time Jaigirdar starts wondering why he took this on.
“I’m trying to just ride the wave and enjoy,” he says with a laugh. “Let’s hope it doesn’t crash on me.”
Things have changed since the festival first started and it was a struggle to find films. Now it’s hard to limit all the films to four days, Jaigirdar says. He says he looks for movies that are aesthetically beautiful and different than what we usually see.
“Certain films just slap you in the face,” he says. “You really want a film to move you or touch you and force you to think about things at a deeper level.”
Jaigirdar says it impresses him when filmmakers spend a lot of time with their subjects, such as with Children of the Pyre about kids working at a cremation ground in Varanasi, India.
“The filmmaker spent a year with the kids trying to learn about the lives of these people and tell us about them,” he says. “Or the documentary Iron Eaters is just so hauntingly poetic, telling us about the men who work breaking down these ships by hammer in this incredibly toxic environment. Or the director of Zero Bridge was over there in Kashmir on a Fulbright and he made the movie by himself with no crew. I could go on and on.”
Jaigirdar says the films are telling a story, not being preaching to people.
“I don’t know if this is right, but someone told me once to cook a lobster you start in cold water and gradually boil it—oh, that sounds awful,” he says. “But these films aren’t didactic. It’s gradual. In Children of the Pyre, you don’t force the viewer into the horrific lives of these children, but gradually allow them in. Or in Zero Bridge, it’s so amazing because in the foreground is the story of this person who wants to leave Kashmir, but in background, always creeping in, is the war in Kashmir.”
All the movies have something to say, Jaigidar says, even the Bollywood movie, My Heart Goes Hooray! (Dil Bole Hadippa!)
“It’s basically about a woman who cross dresses to enter a cricket team,” he says. “The statements she comes out with about women’s place in the world are amazing. You get in there for eye candy, and come out with a political stance.”
This year a lot of the filmmakers, such as Tariq Tapa of Zero Bridge, Baljit Sangra of Warrior Boyz, about Punjabi teens in gangs in Canada, and Joseph Mathew of Bombay Summer, will be at the festival. Kiran Bedi, the subject of Yes Madam, Sir and the director, Megan Doneman, will attend as well.
Jaigirdar says having the filmmakers there adds another dimension.
“The filmmaker can address all sorts of issues and inform us about things in the film that we wouldn’t have known about,” he says. “It allows the audience access. Film watching can be passive. I mean, we hope people will think about what they see and do something, but with the filmmaker there it’s more active.”
There is just one film in the festival Jaigirdar isn’t quite sure what to make of.
He says the South Indian spoof of westerns, Quick Gun Murugun, about a vegetarian cowboy, baffles him.
“The South Indians on the panel loved it,” he says. “I just did not get it. I’m totally at a loss. It’s a different cinematic language, almost."
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