INTACH Filmit Delhi Festival

INTACH has come up with numerous innovative programmes for heritage education. Filmit India is one such active and successful endeavour. Herein children are encouraged to pull out their cameras to capture the magnificence of their motherland and exchange their images with their counterparts the U.K. through the Filmit website.   Filmit India is a project established in collaboration with the Helen Hamlyn Trust. U.K since 2008 across 12 schools in Delhi. By 2011 it is hoping to spread to Chennai and Kolkata. Teachers and school children are trained on simple film-making and editing techniques, principles of script-writing and content development.   The INTACH FilmIt Delhi Festival was held on 10 February, 2011 at the India Islamic Centre auditorium. The Chief Guest was Ms. Sagarika Ghosh, well-known television journalist at CNN IBN and the Guest of Honour was Ms. Sanjana Kapoor of Prithvi Theatre fame. The theme for this year's films was 'SAVE'. The students spared no effort to showcase their remarkable 'expertise' in creating their short films on the subject. They chose the opportunity to prepare a narrative o how to save heritage films. And expectedly their script, screen play, music score and acting collected them accolades from distinguished guests! The festival was attended by students and teachers from several schools in Delhi and the programme received wide coverage in the media. Movies from 20 schools from across Delhi were exhibited o the occasion. Our School submitted 5 movies made by the students, of which Siri made by Kabir Arora of class 11 and Ritwik Arora of class 7 took the awards for Best Picturewhilst, A Step To Save The Monumentsmade by Ishaan Sharma of class 10 won the award for Best Visuals and Narration Award. At the felicitation ceremony, each school was to present a performance, either musical, dance, drama etc on any aspect of Indian heritage that they felt strongly about. Our students offered a self-composed song which was sung as a choir by Deepak Kumar, Ahan Ghosh, Jaskaran Gupta, Ayush Mallik and Surbhi Bhatt. Filmit proved to be an exciting and novel way to ignite an interest for heritage amongst the young. It uses a medium that the young today feel motivated about, namely, film-making, to explore their own culture and that of others, their own ages, abroad. The sighting of new perspectives of what is introduced by the exercise, thus gets easily facilitated in the young minds and a new enrichment is enabled. No doubt the childen now eagerly await the endeavour's next season!