30 November 18:00 In English
Nordic Hotel Forum (Viru väljak 3)
THE TWILIGHT PHENOMENON
It's a special event that would focus on vampires, ghosts and other horror creatures that populate our cities as one of the popular topics in literature and cinematography. The concept would be as follows: 40-60 minutes discussion about the interesting phenomenon of how one or the other literary work suddenly rises to the top of popularity without any particularly obvious reasons. The most evident examples: Harry Potter, Da Vinci Code, now Twilight that is conquering the world both as a book and as a film.
Target question: Can we plan the next big hit? What can be done to achieve that? Can we only follow the existing tendencies in literature and film-business and just record them or can we influence the public's opinion at our will?
Speakers:
Julian Friedman - traditions of the "vampire topic" in the history of cinematography.
Antonina Gall - modern tendencies of vampire topics in the world literature.
Elena Usacheva - town fantasy, the author speaks about her characters and ideas.
5 December 13:00 In English
Apollo book store, Solaris Centre (Estonia pst 9)
INDIAN CINEMA - THE POLITICS OF FILMIC EMOTION - Krishnan Hariharan (NETPAC Jury member, director)
Through the 20th century the cinemas of India have figured only occasionally either in major film festivals or in the academic forums of international film study circles. And now strangely, under the nomenclature of ‘Bollywood’, Indian cinema is slowly growing to become a worldwide phenomenon. Why and what has motivated this change? The primary objective of the lecture is to study how an ‘under-developed’ nation like India and her not-so-skilled entrepreneurs developed the art and craft of cinema to establish the biggest feature film producing center in the world. This will prompt us to study the reasons why Indian popular cinema had to become such an important ‘political & emotional’ vehicle to unite the diverse peoples of a post-colonial nation state. As a result we will also come to know more about the production methodology that engineers the process of filmmaking in India, along with the distribution parameters and release outlets that help Indian films reach around 5 billion viewers every year.
