12 Sep Ramachandra PN to head IFFT-Orange Online Short & Docu Film Festival Jury
National award-winning filmmaker Ramachandra PN will serve as Jury Chairman of the IFFT-Orange Online Short and Documentary Film Festival Competition that is to be held online on September 21,22 and 23.
The other two members of this three-member jury are Rekha Raj, a Dalit and Feminist thinker and Aditya Shankar, a short & animation film maker and writer. This national jury will pick up the winners of the Short and Documentary Film Festival Competition section in which 22 films were selected.
Ramachandra PN, Jury Chairman
Ramchandra PN is an alumni of the Film & TV Institute of India (popularly called Pune Film Institute), Asia’s prime film school situated in Pune. After graduating from the Direction & Screenplay writing discipline in 1990, he has been making independent feature films, documentaries, short films and TV programmes for the past three decades. His first feature ‘Suddha (The Cleansing Rites)’ won the best Indian Film at the 2006 Osian Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Films and in the same year was bestowed with a Hubert Bals exhibition grant. His children’s feature ‘Putaani Party (The Kid Gang) won the best children’s film at the 2009 National Film Awards and was in consideration for a nomination at the Asian Pacific Screen Awards the same year.
He has been regularly writing on films for the portal Upperstall.com, has over the years conducted film related workshops in major film and communication schools in India and has been a member of various film commissioning and festival preselection committees; as well as a jury member in Film Festivals.
Rekha Raj
A film buff and ardent lover of film festivals, Rekha Raj is a Dalit and Feminist thinker, social activist and writer. She is a public intellectual and scholar for more than a decade and has delivered lectures in prestigious institutions in India like Christ University, HCU, TISS etc. She had offered more than 50 public lectures on development issues, gender, human rights, and Dalit issues.
Rekha Raj, Jury Member
She was born on 5th May 1978 in Kottayam, a central district of Kerala. With a PhD in philosophy under the title ‘Politics of Gender and Dalit Identity: Representation of Dalit Women in Contemporary Dalit Discourses in Kerala’, she currently works as Assistant Professor at School of Gandhian Thought and Development Studies in Mahatma Gandhi University. Before becoming a professor she was a project manager of women’s rights at Amnesty International India.
She has penned a book titled ‘Dalit Sthree Idapedalukal’ in 2015 and it is translated into Tamil in 2017. Edited a special issue of Sanghaditha Magazine on ‘Dalit Women’ in 2013. She has written many articles both in English and Malayalam including ‘Economic and Political Weekly’, Mathrubhumi, Samakalika Malayalam and Madhyamam weeklies. She also writes short stories, screen plays and a frequent speaker in channel discussions on socio-political, democratic and gender issues. Her areas of academic interests are extended with gender, development, ethnic, cultural, dalit, Ambedkarite and subaltern studies. She always had a passion for cinema and avid participant of film festival circuit. She has recently penned a screenplay too.
Aditya Shankar
Aditya Shankar is the author of After Seeing (2006), a collection of cine-poems that engages in a dialogue with world cinema through verses. He, along with his friends, founded the Animation studio D3V, for which he wrote and directed short films.
Aditya Shankar, Jury Member
His animated shorts have participated in International film festivals such as IDSFFK and AIFF. His short has also been nominated for awards such as Golden Cursor Animation Award. He worked on the subtitles of the Malayalam film Oozham, directed by Jeethu Joseph. He was part of the editorial board of International Film Festival Thrissur(IFFT) and edited Kottaka, their daily bulletin for the 2005 edition of the festival. He is also a widely published bilingual writer and translator.