Chairman’s Message

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We are all born creative. As we grow up, society, or perhaps our system of education, teaches us to suppress our creative urges. And so we lose the urge to express how we perceive the world around us. For each of us perceive the world differently. Like our individual fingerprints, no one perceives the same.

The courage then, to express your perception of the world, defines an artist. Be it a filmmaker, a painter, a poet, a musician. The courage to to face an empty blank canvass, and to make the first brush stroke. That first brush stroke that explores the rest of the painting, the rest of the symphony, the rest of the film.

So how do you teach filmmaking, or its component parts? Be it directing, acting, sound, writing ?

The answer is simple. You don’t teach. You simply provoke the artist in the student. You simply encourage the students to explore the artist in themselves. And then allow them to learn how to use the technology of their chosen art, the camera lens, the edit machine, the pen, the body, the voice, the soul, to express the world through their own lens.

There is no teaching, but there is co learning between the teacher and the taught. In a way, to relearn your creative expression also involves a process of unlearning.

I look forward to an immense learning and unlearning experience for myself, in my tenure as Chairman of the Institute

Shekhar Kapur