Karnataka Culture @BICFEST

11:15 AM  | Paddayi (Feature Film)

PADDAYI is a modern-day adaptation of the epic drama, ‘Macbeth’ from Shakespeare. This version of Macbeth plays out in a tiny village in the borders of mega city. Characters in the film belong to an indigenous community of fishermen. Madhava and Sugandhi are a newly married couple from the fishing community of South India. Their lust for better life and thirst for upward mobility is ignited by the prophecies from the spirit that wander the land.

Duration: 100 Minutes | Language: Tulu (With English Subtitles)

The screening will be followed by an interaction with the director Abhaya Simha

1:30 PM | Modernity in Kannada Poetry 

2:30 PM | Remembering Shivaram Karanth – SR Vijayashankara

Kota Shivaram Karanth (10 October 1902 – 9 December 1997) was an Indian polymath, who was a novelist in Kannada language, playwright and conservationist.. Ramachandra Guha called him the “Rabindranath Tagore of Modern India, who has been one of the finest novelists-activists since independence”. He was the third writer to be decorated with the Jnanpith Award for Kannada, the highest literary honor conferred in India. His son Ullas Ullas is a conservationist.

4:30 PM | Ja-Ra-Gi Theater Performance, Moorumugham

Jaragi is the Kannada word for ‘shift’

A performative investigation of the body, love, and leaving.

Kannada, Tamil, Hindi and English.

Duration: 45 minutes.
Limited seating.
Please note that the presentation is work-in-development.

All day | Demo of Folk Chittara Painting

Chittara is an autochthonous art practice. It is a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon of the Deevaru community – a matriarchal and an agrarian community of nature worshipers, residing in an around Sagar. It is engaged primarily by the Women folk of the community as a socio-cultural practice, which embodies a microcosm of socio-cultural dynamic.

Nestled deep in the villages of Hasunvanthe, Honnemaradu and Majina Kaanu (in Shimoga district of South Kanara) in the Western Ghats are the Deewaru tribals` huts that spell magic with their age-old Chittara Wall paintings. These paintings adorn their walls, their colourful imagery bringing out the vivid beauty of the surrounding tropical forests. White from a mixture of rice paste, red from crushed stone, burnt rice for deepest black, yellow from `gurige` seeds – it is a lyrical creative mosaic that Deewaru men and women conjure up. With auspicious geometric motifs ranging from yogic `asana` poses to tribal figures celebrating life, in style and delineation, the Chittara wall paintings and mural crafts seem to take one back to the Stone Age cave paintings.