FAMILY ALBUM
66/India/2010
Synopsis
Family Album portrays the complex emotions a body of personal photographs can arouse in us. Set in Kolkata, the film documents and dramatises the imaginable worlds in and around assorted family albums, as family members reflect on the memories evoked by old photographs. Even as they hold their family albums as authentic summaries of kinship, they curiously examine them to make new discoveries. In the process, these keepers of personal photo archives become compelling storytellers as well as interrogators of their culture and history. Taking its cue from the narrators, both women and men, the film foregrounds stories of women, bringing them out of the shadows in which many lived their lives. In this way the story escapes the confines of the photograph and of individual memory.
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Direction: Nishtha Jain
Associate Direction: Smriti Nevatia
Script & Research: Smriti Nevatia & Nishtha Jain
Cinematography: Any Goswami, Savita Singh, Deepti Gupta
Music: Borut Krzisnik
Sound Design: Niraj Gera
Location Sound: Abdul Rajjak
Artwork: Pryas Gupta
Producer: Nishtha Jain, Raintree Films
Supported by IFA, Banglaore & IGNCA, New Delhi
“Family Album generously allows the intersection of photographs, memory and cross-generational stories rather than forcing their paths to collide, and what struck me long after I had finished watching, was how little the filmmaker injected herself or her agenda onto the frames, letting the subjects speak for their own histories. And that is precisely what photographs become, irrespective of what we wish them to be—chroniclers of history, crystallized pieces of time that hold individual yet shared versions of stories that become the truth, regardless of the fleeting reality of the moment.”
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