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Gurvinder Singh
Film director
My teacher, the master explorer of cinematic form, Mani Kaul, left us 10 years ago on July 6, 2011. He was 66. In his body of work, from Uski Roti (1969) to Naukar ki Kameez (1999), he created an idea of temporality, profoundly marked and informed by his understanding of Indian music, aesthetics and philosophy. In doing so, he not only created a highly personalised idiom of expression, but challenged the existing notions of meaning and cinematic forms that proved challenging for many an audience, used as they are to a certain acceptable system of the socio-industrial form of filmmaking, which treats facts and meaning as pivots around which a film’s narrative is received and understood.