The best from the Dharamshala Film Festival to be screened in South Mumbai

The Look of Silence

A selection of some of the finest films screened at the Dharamshala International Film Festival will now be screened in Mumbai thanks to a collaboration between Alliance Francaise, Mumbai and the festival organisers.

Internet's Own Boy

The Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) is presented by White Crane Arts & Media, a trust founded by renowned filmmakers Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, to promote contemporary art, cinema and independent media practices in the Himalayan region of India.

The Tale of Iya

Raman Chawla, associate director of the festival, says the films to be screened in Mumbai in the event, Best of Diff, are selected from the 2015 chapter of the festival. "This initiative is to popularise the festival and take the cinema we screened to more people. Screenings like this also spread the culture of good cinema," he reasons.

Sheryn Mulla from the culture wing of Alliance Francaise says, "We are happy to provide space for screenings and the organisation always encourages such cultural activities," she says.

Screening roster
The Internet's Own Boy is the story of Aaron Swartz by Brian Knappenberger. This film is about Swartz, the computer-programming prodigy with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. From his help in the development of the basic web protocol RSS, to his co-founding of social networking and news website Reddit, Swartz's fingerprints are all over the Internet. But it was his groundbreaking work in civil rights and political organisation, combined with aggressive approach to information access, which ensnared him in a two-year legal battle, culminating in apparent suicide.

The Look of Silence by Joshua Oppenheimer is a film about an Indonesian optometrist Adi, who travels performing eye tests and interviewing locals who were involved in mass slaughter during an anti-communist ‘purge'.

The Tale of Iya by Tetsuichiro Tsuta (Japanese film) begins with a middle-aged man rescuing a baby girl from a frozen river. The baby grows into the teenaged Haruna, who lives with the now-elderly ‘Grandpa' near a village in the Iya Valley, Japan. Once a thriving farming community, now only a handful of the original villagers remain, outnumbered by two groups of settlers - a construction company digging a tunnel through the valley and a commune of western gap-year students who protest against the work.