New to VOD this week:
PUSHKAR PURAN
Director:
Kamal Swaroop
Premiere:
Montreal World 2017
Select Festivals:
Mumbai, DOK Leipzig, Taiwan Doc, Edinburgh, Doclisboa
About:
Several days at a massive Hindu festival.
Cult filmmaker Swaroop’s film is an experimental immersion into the festivities around the Hindu holy city of Pushkar. His camera weaves around various activities, from observers making offerings or cleansing in sacred waters to people dancing, animals being paraded around, and tourists observing the festivities. All the while, a voiceover rattles off Hindu cosmology to accompany the occasionally arresting visuals. Offering virtually no context for viewers unfamiliar with either the city’s importance or whatever larger meaning the poetic meditation is meant to evoke, this remains a messy and not altogether particularly interesting project for outsiders.
what (not) to doc 