9th – 10th May 2026 | ONLINE | with Debkamal Ganguly | 2 days, 05 hours per day (with one break of 20 min.)
Participant profile
This course is designed for cinephiles, students of film, and creative artists seeking a deeper understanding of how personal memory is transmuted through cinematic-artistic creation. It will also resonate with people interested in the relationship between time, memory, ethical becoming and the moving image. No prior theory is required, but a patience for attentive viewing and a readiness to think through experience rather than explanation will be an advantage.
Course Overview
This two-day online course would explore Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975) as a profound cinematic act of self-discovery. Celebrating half a century of the life of the film, the course will examine Mirror not merely as a memoir on celluloid, but as the director’s rigorous artistic and creative effort to locate and restore his ground of life. By navigating the fluid boundaries between memories, dreams, reality, and history, participants will see how Tarkovsky uses cinematic contemplation to transform personal existence into a universal spiritual inquiry, especially in a time of heightened bureaucratic materialism of erstwhile USSR.
The course would delve into the creative evolution of the film, with the references of Tarkovsky’s own script and diary entries. The film would open up an unparallel process of the volatilization of personal memory — how specific, private recollections are distilled during the scripting process and eventually transformed into the film’s oneiric yet rooted mise-en-scène. This transition from raw memory to structured image and fluid sensations offers a rare window into the alchemy of Tarkovsky’s creative process, dissolving the boundaries between lived experience and cinematic form.
Particular attention will be given to the figure of the mother, the use of poetry by his father Arseny Tarkovsky, and the role of natural elements — wind, fire, water — as carriers of memory beyond the human subject. Participants will be invited to consider how the film’s images do not represent personal memory but enact their presence, creating a space where personal and historical time intersect. The course will open toward broader philosophical resonances, where cinema emerges as a site for grounding existence through time, echoing concerns found in thinkers like Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze.
Central to the study would be Tarkovsky’s seminal thesis from his book Sculpting in Time, focusing on the vital links between time, memory, and ethical existence. Mirror will be seen as a significant shift from the dense sensorial conceptualism of Solaris, moving toward a more direct, yet more pulsating form of cinema and narrative. Ultimately, the course would underscore Tarkovsky’s belief that without memory, without yearning for the memory, without the conscious engagement with the traces of the lost time, human beings tend to lose their ground of ethical existence, making Mirror an essential human document for preservation of the possibility of ethical becoming of the self.
The course is designed for persons interested in cinema, literature, artistic quest and philosophy, e.g. cinema of the great auteurs, cinema as philosophical acts, cinema’s methodological relationship with the historicity, temporality and sensations of a defining geographical landscape, the relationship between cinema and literature mediated through landscape
FACULTY PROFILE:
An alumnus from Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI), Kolkata, DebKamal Ganguly is an independent filmmaker, researcher and teacher of cinematic arts. He has taught for 08 years (2012-2020) and designed curriculum in Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, in the departments of Film Editing, Film Direction and Screen Studies; and as a guest faculty in National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, Flame University, Pune, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, Bhubaneswar. Ganguly’s works have been published under special curator-ship from Lowave, Paris; his video art featured in the exhibition ‘Indian Highway’ and showcased in galleries of various cities of Europe and Asia. His films done in the capacity of editor, script-writer and sound designer have been shown in competitive sections of various international festivals and received recognition, including ‘Tiger Award for Shorts’ in Rotterdam (IFFR 2007). Ganguly has presented papers in various international and national seminars and conferences on various themes related to cinema, Deleuze studies, visual art, interfaces of art practices, translation studies, collective memory, Bengal studies, Media studies, pedagogy of cinema, film editing as a discipline, immersive sound etc including CARA-CILECT conference in Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg (2018), CILECT conference in VGIK, Moscow (2019), Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater (2019). He is a participant of an international project for artistic research involving BRICS countries, being the coordinator for India (2018).
BASELINE CONTRIBUTION TO CONFIRM PARTICIPATION:
₹ 1300 – For Indian Participants
€ 30 – For International Participants
(We invite you to contribute over and above the baseline – voluntarily, if you wish)
CERTIFICATES:
Digital certificates of participation will be issued.
QUERIES:
For queries, if any, please write to: filminstitute@auroville.org.in
or call / message +91 9969879319 (whatsapp and telegram only)
Auroville Film Institute 