Vipin Vijay's VIDEO GAME in Rotterdam Fest

Video Game, the short film made by young Malayalee filmmaker Vipin Vijay has been selected to the Rotterdam International Film Festival, 2007. The film has been included in the Tiger Award section in the 36th Rotterdam International Film Festival, which was inaugurated on the 24th of this month. Out of the 27 short films that contest in the Tiger Awards Section, Video Game is the only entry from India. Video Game, which has already won awards like the John Abraham National Award for the Best Documentary (Environmental), comes from the maker of some critically acclaimed films like Hawa Mahal, Kshurasya Dhara (The Razor's Edge) etc.

Hailing from Kozhikode, Vipin Vijay is a product of the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Kolkata and is keen on experimenting with short films. Video Game is an excellent example of this. The film, which in the words of Vipin Vijay himself is "a complex video journey on a motor car", speaks in a very different way about the evolution of cinema as well as of the automobile. The shots are so aligned as to give us the feel of being on a journey in a car. The journey is one undertaken by the film crew in a Mark III Ambassador car and traverses across a vast expanse of land, providing viewers with diverse sights, reminiscent of the diversity of life and also of evolution.

The film may be interpreted as speaking of evolution on three levels - evolution of cinema, evolution of the automobile and evolution of the filmmaker himself. "Both cinema and the automobile have been instrumental in bringing a kind of freedom to explore through time and space. And this thought fascinated me and made me do such a film"- says Vipin Vijay. Video Game, with duration of 30 minutes, has been produced by Rajiv Mehrotra for the Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT) and features script by Vipin Vijay and Debkamal Ganguly and camera by Vipin Vijay himself.