Aabobo Film Festival 2018: Govinda Raju's Sonyacha Amba, Prateek Vats' Retracing Freedom; Goa to be showcased on Day 2

The Aabobo Film Festival — a platform dedicated to support short Indie films being produced in the country — which kicked off in Goa on 30 November will feature the shorts Narbodh, Vaarasa, Sonyacha Amba, and Retracing Freedom; Goa, on the second day of the event. The Aabobo group constitutes filmmakers, writers, actors, cinematographers, sound designers, music composers, editors and enthusiasts who conduct monthly discussions on the challenges faced by Indie cinema. [caption id=“attachment_5641821” align=“alignnone” width=“825”]  A still from Prakash Vats’ Retracing Freedom; Goa.[/caption] The film festival, being held at the Museum of Goa in Bardez, is referred to by the group as the fourth chapter of their initiative. The first three were held in Mumbai. Govinda Raju’s  Sonyacha Amba (Golden Mango), one of the films that will be screened on 1 December is a story that emerges from the filmmakers internal anguish and is about children who cannot afford to enjoy the simplest of needs, such as a mango during summer in a world where wealth is worshipped above all else. Raju says of his films, “Culturally rooted reality and a magical allegorical realism find an unusual confluence in the stories I work with.” The festival will also screen Retracing Freedom; Goa, a project by  Prateek Vats, alumnus of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) and one of the organisers of a two-day film festival held in 2015 in Goa of the same name. The Retracing Freedom event was organised in protest against the International Film Festival of India after students of FTII alleged that several of their films had been excluded from the screening there. Shreyas Chougule’s Vaarasa, also a part of the event, follows the story of the son of a lower caste sewage worker who tries to find solid ground while struggling to accept the death of his father and coming to terms with his sister’s unaffected attitude towards the family’s financial crisis. Day 2 of Aabobo will also host a panel discussion between filmmakers Hina Sayeda and Leena Manimekalai, actors Shwetaab Singh and Sushama Deshpande and Devashish Makhija. The Aabobo Film Festival will be held in Goa till 2 December, 2018.