Kolkata: Cannes-award winner Anuparna Roy, who won Best Director in the Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti section last year, backed the SRFTI student resistance in a Tuesday video message, demanding that rustication orders for six students be revoked. She also called for VC Santosh Ajmera’s resignation.Roy said that a film school must be a place, where students were “free to question authority”. “Some students questioned why the right-wing group ABVP was allowed on their campus to hold a meeting,” she said in her video, mentioning the violence against students on Sept 27 and Oct 4. Roy told TOI: “After the second attack, more than ten were reportedly hospitalised, including one with a serious head injury. The students questioned why no FIR was registered against their attackers. Instead of addressing their concerns, the administration turned against them. Six students received rustication notices, and an FIR was filed against one.” This incident, she said, raised “a fundamental question” for her. “When students are attacked for questioning the authority, why are they the ones being punished? A film school must teach us to see critically, to question, and to speak freely. We cannot allow those very freedoms to be crushed within the institute. You cannot beat students into silence. You cannot punish them into submission. Rusticating students for raising their voices is not democracy, it is dictatorship wearing the mask of institutional authority. An institute meant to nurture critical thought cannot survive by punishing dissent. When the freedom to question is taken away, education becomes propaganda,” she said, quoting Kazi Nazrul Islam’s ‘Bidrohi’ that “the spirit of rebellion must never be rusticated”.Roy’s message came on a day students announced a series of independent film-making workshops and screenings under the banner, ‘Cinema as a Weapon of Resistance’, amid police presence on campus and restrictions on outsiders. This initiative has been inspired by the 1995 Danish Dogme 95 avant-garde movement—founded by Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, and Kristian Levring to strip Hollywood artifice and special effects in favour of pure storytelling, natural lighting, handheld cameras and strict production rules known as the ‘Vow of Chastity’. The ‘Cinema as a Weapon of Resistance’ is led by ‘Saat Khoon Maaf’ cinematographer and National Award-winning documentary filmmaker Ranjan Palit, followed by a special screening of his film, ‘A Knock on the Door’.On Tuesday, students shared 15-odd questions with the administration, saying the 14 show-cause notices and six rustication notices were issued without transparency or accountability. They demanded to know who authorised the chief accounts officer to issue these notices contrary to academic bye-laws and who formed the fact-finding committee.
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