New Delhi: Just days after a scheduled public screening of a documentary by a former student of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) was cancelled mere hours before it was to take place on September 6, the film in question was finally screened on September 10.Meant to be a private screening only for a small group of invitees, at the event, the students reportedly discovered that a few police officials were in attendance. According to a statement release by the FTII Students’ Association, when the students confronted the policemen, the officials chose to leave the venue.The statement says that the presence of the police “can only be assumed as a move to intimidate the students and an attack on their right to express freely in this campus”.Demanding an explanation for the presence of the police, the students’ association condemned the administration for allowing policemen into the theatre where the film was being screened.The film in question, Hora, is the work of Harishankar Nachimuthu, who was president of the FTII students’ union during the 2015 protest against the appointment of Gajendra Chauhan as chairman of FTII. The documentary is about the Kabir Kala Manch.Nachimuthu had alleged last week that the administration received threats from the Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), which is what led to the screening being cancelled. The administration had cited that the problem was that invites had been sent to outsiders, something the students’s body refutes in its statement: “The said film of the student was earlier denied by the institute stating that outsiders had been invited. The student had never invited the outsiders in the first place.”After getting permission to screen the film for a small number of students and faculty, Nachimutthu’s Facebook status read, “Finally after so much unwanted ruckus created by the administration we are screening Hora for the people of FTII and the people who had participated in the film. As the film is not certified it’s not a public screening.”“The students are being sent a message by the institute that their films will be watched by police officers and we as student community are afraid that in the future even our scripts can be scrutinised by the institute administration and only scripts that are in line with the ideological position of the people heading the administration might even be allowed to film,” the press release reads.The administration is already entangled in a dispute as 50 students of the 2017 batch have been boycotting the classes since August 21, demanding prior information on the syllabus and basic infrastructure. Despite several meetings between students and the administration, students claim that amenities that would be considered very basic at any art school, are not available at FTII.
