On August 30th, 2011, I was reading the city supplement of The Hindu & I stumbled on an article with a picture of a man riding a bicycle, but weirdly captioned “Ideas from the rooftop”. Driven by curiosity I decided to kill few minutes on the article & even before I finished reading, I knew i wanted to be a part of the movement, Chennai Rooftop film festival that is.

Until circa 2008 I wasn’t interested in any movies except the ones made in Tamil, Malayalam & Hindi. I detested watching international cinema mainly because of the lack of command over the languages & cultural differences. But I was proved wrong by a bunch of IIT graduates who happened to be my colleagues & flatmates when I was working in Bangalore. Every night after they come home from work, they will be glued to their laptops watching 2 or 3 movies in various languages & genres whilst I scoff about their lame activity. A few weeks later unknowingly I got sucked into it & haven’t looked back yet. Nowadays it’s hard to leave a week back without watching 4-5 movies & even more at times. Still there are thousands of classics & cult movies to catch up & 8-10 new ones keep evolving every week. Thanks to twitter & now to RTFF; following movie moguls, critics, fans & connoisseurs ensures that you stay on top of all the news, trends, feature releases, & other assorted suggestions & discussions. What a package!

RTFF (Roof Top Film Festival) in Chennai was founded & organised by a cohort of bloggers around 2007. What made them to start such a venture? Mainly it’s out of passion for cinema the art & respect for cinema the social-cultural adhesive. How did I & 350+ people in Chennai are intrigued to it and what made people to celebrate it in legend?

The article in the newspaper had a brief write-up about what it is used to be & how was it started and how it got canned. Apparently the founding members got dislocated for career reasons & eventually RTFF went into hibernation. There were no heirs to keep the legacy alive & there were no givers of venue & gradually the ritual went into a coma. Years later, few pioneers wanted to revamp the almost obsolete concept and bring it back to action from its outmoded structure. Via the article, they invited like minded people for discussion & drinks at a juice bar located in the heart of the city on a Thursday evening. It was raining cats & dogs after I started from home to meet those strangers who love cinema. On my way I thought nobody will show up due to the outburst of heavy rain and subsequently they will tweet that it’s re-scheduled. I reached the spot  a tad late like always and was flabbergasted to see a group of 10-15 people already introducing themselves to each other. As usual I sneaked in sheepishly and grabbed a seat. Embarrassed and drenched by the rain & shame.

After rounds of introduction they discussed on how to bring the movement back to life and finally decided to run the event again on a monthly basis starting from September 2011. Suggestions and ideas about genres were pouring in heavily than the rain. Finally the group decided to give the event a re-birth with a night of Heist movies which will be curated by Sandeep Makam, founder of a corporate communication agency. Consensus was reached about promoting RTFF through social networks and each individual took charge of creating accounts in various networks. Hence the birth of a new Twitter handle and a new FaceBook page. Date, venue & curators for following months were revealed a few days later through a google group digest and eventually posts started appearing on the timeline and wall. Everything set. Curiosity soared high.

Arrived the night of Heist movies. Curator arrived couple of hours earlier to setup the mattresses, audio and video at ‘The Startup Centre’; venue for RTFF nights for the past 5 months. ‘The Startup Centre’ is mainly an Entrepreneur preening and Startup nurturing firm founded by Vijay Anand, The Startup Guy & Serial Entrepreneur. We are all eternally thankful to Vijay who generously hosts us every month with a big smile on his face. That was the night I first saw a group of 20-25 people who really knew what they were talking about. Not general bluffing about how a movie was good or bad, hit or bombed.. Their insights made me to run for covers. I could only nod & grin as if I knew all about movies. Later when I discuss with my non-RTFF friends, I brag as if I taught Tarantino cinema. I stole their words & musings, plagiarised it & presented as my findings & musings. Yes, I am proud of my juvenile deed. 4 films were played and the curator roped in famous director Venkat Prabhu, because that was the time his semi-heist movie ‘Mankatha’ released and was making a healthy ruckus in the south Indian film industry. Participants grilled the esteemed guest of honour with whys and hows and the guest ensured  he answered them articulately with few justifications.

For October 2011, Vijay Venkataramanan, a Film Editor/Screenwriter, volunteered to curate the night with ‘Monster Movies’ to commemorate Halloween. We still cherish the memory of watching an amazing movie ‘The Host’ and 3 other movies with supernatural beings going bonkers. The amount of knowledge and insights Vijay has about cinema & film-making will pin you down & makes you to listen to him talking about the movie rather watching the movie itself.

For November 2011, Javeeth Ahamed, an engineer who works for a multinational iron and steel company, decided to make the participants laugh their everything off with his unique genre of ‘War Comedies’. The night was kicked off with Buster Keaton’s evergreen classic ‘The General’ and 3 other hilarious war movies which makes you laugh. Yes, war movies. C.S. Amudhan, the director of the hit spoof-comedy movie ‘Tamil Padam’ was the guest. He brought the house down sharing his experiences of making the movie. The amount of effort Javeeth took to gather non trivial information about the movies that was played and its background was inspiring to others. He set a benchmark.

For December 2011, Murali Raja, an Application Engineer stepped up to curate and picked ‘Animation’ as the genre. The night started off with the highly acclaimed fantasy adventure animation movie ‘Spirited Away’ & followed by 3 other movies in various languages and ended with the rib tickling ‘South Park’. Despite being swamped by an unforeseen training program at work, Murali efficiently ran the night by picking movies that had set benchmark in its genre for its technical brilliance and plot wise rich content, which you can’t find elsewhere generally.

For January 2012, I was the curator and I decided to go with a serious genre, mainly because the last two editions were light hearted. I chose ‘Murder Mystery’ as the theme and immediately after deciding the genre; I decided I’m not going to play Hitchockish typical whodunits. The night started off very late because of the technical glitches with the sound & later visuals too. I started with a heavy plotted, based on a true incident, Korean movie, ‘Memories Of Murder’, followed by a humorous narrative whodunit movie. That night I invited acclaimed director Mysskin to share his thoughts about the genre, since he was the one to direct a very cleverly devised and dramatic murder mystery film ‘Yuddham Sei’ in Tamil after a long while. The movie was such a breath of fresh air & his presence that night was an epitome of how a disastrous event can be savoured with other distinguished elements. People found his perspective intriguing and his suggestions and idea invaluable. He was able to articulate about a wide spectrum of topics from neo-realism to music score in mainstream pictures.

For February 2012, Sandeep Narayanan, a Dentist has decided to showcase Indian Panorama. We all are looking for a night of multilingual visual treat. Since I & Sandeep became friends through RTFF, I am closely watching the amount of effort he has put in for the night. I couldn’t believe when he said he finished watching a Manipuri movie to see whether it can be projected for RTFF. Whoa! That is some amount of time contributed to a non-career task. The crowd is excited and registrations were opened a few days back and were closed within 20 minutes as soon as we broke last month’s high number of registrants.

RTFF in Chennai is already a hit and is spreading like wildfire. The event was once covered by a news channel for their lifestyle show and was on the air of couple of morning shows in radio and several other write-ups in newspapers, leading journals & blogs.  The only hindrance for taking this to next level is availability and size of venues. Till date we have been accepting only 70 registrations because of the occupancy limit at the venue. We have been requesting participants to find suitable places which can accommodate more participants so that several other people can be a part of this movement. Curators were being asked via email, twitter & phone by folks from other cities on how to start such a movement in their respective cities. There are several other things which are lined up for the future and we are all excited about the drama.

On a lighter end note, few people do come for the screenings & turn on their slumber mode around the end of 1^st movie & make industrial snoring noises. I still don’t understand. Why would one go to a social gathering & sleep when they already have the comfort of sleeping cozily at home.

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About The Author

Girish Chandran is a film addict and earns a living working for an Australian e-commerce firm.
Follow on Twitter:  www. twitter.com/girishchandran