A festival that celebrates filmmaking around puppetry

The second edition of PuppetOscope explores the niche form of puppet films, a precursor to modern animation

- Prachi Sibal

Nurupa Roy, a puppeteer and theatre practitioner, is an integral part of the performing arts ecosystem in India. She set up Katkatha, an organisation for the promotion and preservation of the puppet arts in India, 26 years ago. Over the years, the team has produced several landmark puppet theatre productions such as About Ram (2006) and their most recent, Arabian Nights. In 2022, just as the world was recovering from the covid pandemic and the performing arts industry too was trying to get back onto its feet, Roy hosted PuppetOscope, the first of its kind puppet film festival in the country. It was also a celebration of 25 years of Katkatha's existence. "The pandemic had generated a lot of online content. It felt like the ideal moment to bring a large chunk of it from around the world to people in Delhi and celebrate that the pandemic was over," she says. They received around 40 applications, and the festival screened 21 puppetry films—both Indian and international ones.

Puppet films are a niche form of filmmaking that dates back to the 1900s wherein the characters on screen are in the form of puppets. Roy believes that the mediums of animation and film can trace back their technical and magical lineage to puppetry and continue to have a synergy that often remains unexplored. "We don't want to operate in silos. We wanted to see the conversation that emerges from putting puppet theatre, cinema, and animation in the same festival," says Roy.