The documentary scene in India is alive and here to stay. Armed with handycams, young film makers, artists, village people, house wives and children are making movies for themselves and for a growing audience.

’One Billion Eyes’, the Indian Documentary Film Festival represents that, all of India can be seen through a billion different ways, providing a billion different views on things around us, that affect us and our lives in a billion ways.

Last year Prakriti Foundation oganised and hosted VIKALP, a festival on documentary films which were shown in Madras for several weekends to almost full houses. It showed us that there is a growing audience for documentary films and they are very interested in different points and perspectives - women issues, alternate sexuality, art, travel or identities. Over the years, we'd like to feature films on the widest possible range of subjects. So, we have decided to take them on alphabetically, beginning with the letter 'A' this year.

Films on Art, Animals and Activism will be shown every day. The festival will open with a screening of Rakesh Sharma's much talked-about 'Final Solution'. We will finish by awarding a "Best Film of the Festival" award and a performance art piece based on documentary film work done in Mizoram.

We look forward to the encouragement of film aficionados and the film community, as well as the growing number of young students whose community is now part of this new medium.

The festival is completely free and is being curated and set up in the sincere hope that the documentary film genre in India is here to stay and will continue to inspire, encourage and make us think of our times and those that will come ahead.

Ranvir Shah
Artistic Director

ABOUT THE FESTIVAL