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The Sonepur fair, in Bihar state, East India, starts every year on the sacred full moon day of Kartika Purnima. Known to be the largest cattle market in Asia, elephants, birds, horses or camels are traded there since hundreds of years.

With its whirlwinds of dust rising from the ground, the fair is also the opportunity for a gigantic carnival. As in a western, men with gleaming black mustaches lead nervous horses, adorned for the demonstration, others drive wild motorcycles, while some organize outrageous parades.

This is where gather all the fairground people of the most infamous state of India, making it the core of the bihari popular culture.And the characters of Kings of the Wind & Electric Queens are its best representatives.

Like the figures of tarot cards, they are the symbolic faces of the fair: the Rider, the Exorcist, the Dancer, the Stuntman or the Mahut (elephant tamer).Each has his rituals, prayers, his methods to accumulate and master the energy of the fair, both mechanical and organic, magic and electric.

On the stage of the fair, each is going to give himself in representation, to entertain the one day spectators crowd, hundred thousands of pilgrims seeking ecstasy, shivers and signs of good fortune.

presentation

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Enter a new tale: an explosively colourful, unusual, and even baffling visual feast from India called Kings of the Wind & Electric Queens.

The setting is The Sonepur Fair, an Indian region that borders Nepal. It's dusty, humid and hot, and the countryside is a little rundown. The rivers Ganges and Gandak run along the fairgrounds, where hundreds of pilgrims wash and converse. While it offers a midway, dancing, singing and motor sports, it's not the most modern-looking of events; think traditional India meets Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

The fair takes place every November, on the full moon day of Kartika Purnima. It has been a destination for centuries. Sonepur is an animal trading market, a stunt festival, a beauty contest and a social celebration all in one. Early images in the film include an elephant being washed in the river, a mechanic building a motorbike engine part by part, and a somewhat rickety-looking big-top circus tent being raised. With no narration, this observational doc may leave you wondering what the heck this fair is all about, and what the attendees are doing there, but this tightrope-style viewing is what makes this film so curious and fun to watch.

As the lens travels through the dust and the people, it captures horses and donkeys being brought in for trade, mystics and fortunetellers vying for attention, and a woman possessed near the river being flogged by holy men and cleansed with smoke.

In another scene, hundreds of men wait in line to watch a stage chock-full of young beauties shaking their bodies and wearing sexy skin-tight saris. Music is blaring from speakers at every corner, most of the sounds blending traditional Indian music with modern auto-tuned vocals.

French filmmakers Cédric Dupire and Gaspard Kuentz are at the helm on this one. You may have caught one of their last docs, We Don't Care About Music Anyway... & The Right Man at the Right Place. I can only imagine how hard it was for these two Frenchmen to blend into the scads of people enjoying the Indian midway, but somehow the attention that they and their cameras must have garnered doesn't get in the way of the storytelling. There's a lot of fantastic imagery to work with here, but it's their skill of editing this doc to make it look almost like a pop video that makes it jump off the screen.

For westerners, this is the stuff of far-off lands, strange and unusual in their customs and celebrations. Clocking in at just under an hour, this is the perfect doc to get lost in. Enjoy scratching your head at the wild images in a world which too often believes that there's nothing left to discover.

by Mark Wigmore, for moviefone

press review

5

KINGS OF THE WIND & ELECTRIC QUEENS

The Sonepur fair in India, with its whirlwinds of dust rising from the ground, is the opportunity for a gigantic carnival where each is going to give itself in representation for the pleasure of day spectators, pilgrims in ecstasy, in search of shivers and signs of good fortune.

As in a western, men with gleaming black mustaches lead nervous horses, adorned for the demonstration, others drive wild motorcycles, while some organize outrageous parades.Each has his rituals, prayers, his methods to accumulate and master the energy of the fair, both mechanical and organic, magic and electric.

Mixing Julien Cloquet / Grading David Coiffier / Titles & credits Arno Dufour Coordination in India Divya Dugar / Translation Tulika Srivastava

credits & technical data

Format HDRunning time56 minutesYear2014ProductionStudio ShaiprodDistribution & salesAndanaFilmsSupported by The Seine-Saint-Denis prefecture in association with the CNC

Directed byGaspard Kuentz & Cédric DupireProduced byJérôme AglibertImage Cédric DupireSoundGaspard KuentzEditingCharlotte TourrèsSound editing & designJaike Stambach

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cédric dupireEverything started with music, sounds, the others, how they cross the world, their world and how they feel it.

Three documentaries about music came out: Musafir, India - 2005, L’Homme qu’il faut à la Place qu’il faut, Guinea Conakry – 2008 and We Don’t Care About Music Anyway…, Japan – 2009. Each environment, each caracter, each music interfered with the cinematographic form, moving from ethnographical to sensitive and poetic approach.

Step by step, these works opened a new path to formal, narrative and emotional experiments. Between 2010 and 2012, four short expérimental films came out : No more free memory…, Dead End, Grey Seeds and O sal Da Lua, A Outra experiencia. The projects to come, Radio Taiso Activity or Amitabh is Amitabh, are crossing borders between documentary and experimental cinema, to mix up reality and fantasy.

Gaspard KuentzBorn in 1981, in Paris, France. Moving to Japan in 2003, he completes the fiction course of the Tokyo film school Eiga Bigakko, founded by well-known Japanese directors Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Shinji Aoyama. Afterwards, he directs the short gangster film Chinpira Is Beautiful, part of the acclaimed short movies omnibus Yakuza 23-ku, produced by Jingumae Produce.

In parallel with his film activities, he gets involved with Tokyo improvised and noise music scene, leading him to start the documentary project We Don’t Care About Music Anyway..., with the Paris-based company Studio Shaiprod. The shooting of this project, showing in a new manner the work of famous Tokyo noise musicians like Otomo Yoshihide, starts in 2007.

Completed in June 2009, We Don’t Care About Music Anyway... is premiered in Locarno International Film Festival’s Critics week in August 2009, and then invited to more than 50 film festivals around the world, including Toronto Hotdocs 2010, South by Southwest 2010 and Cinéma du Réel 2010.

Awarded in Entrevues film festival in 2009 and ERA NH in 2010, We Don’t Care About Music Anyway... is still acclaimed as a new perspective on both avant-garde music and documentary, released in theaters in Japan, Poland and France, and reviewed by famous music magazines like The Wire or included in new medias festivals like Sonar electronic music festival.

Filmography

2014 Kings of the Wind & Electric Queens Documentary co-directed with Cédric Dupire HD / 56’ Best Mid-Length Documentary, Hot Docs 2014

2009 We Don’t Care About Music Anyway... Documentary co-directed with Cédric Dupire HD / 80’ Best Documentary on Art Award, ENH 2010 Creative Award, Traces de Vie 2010 One + One Award, Entrevues Belfort 2009

2006 Chinpira Is Beautiful Short film included in omnibus Yakuza 23-ku DVD published by Bandaï / DV / 6’30’’

In development

ANIMA Feature documentary project coproduced by Jingumae Produce (Japan) & Studio Shaiprod (France)

*ProjectselectedforPitchingduRéel2012 (VisionsduRéel,Nyon,Switzerland) *ProjectselectedfortheLouisLumièreprogram2013, InstitutFrançais *ProjetselectedforTIFFCOMColab2012 (TokyoInternationalFilmFestival,Tokyo,Japan)

Filmography

2014 Kings of the Wind & Electric Queens Documentary co-directed with Gaspard Kuentz HD / 56’ Best Mid-Length Documentary, Hot Docs 2014

2013 Silent Block Experimental film DV / 15’

2012 O sal Da Lua, A Outra experiencia Experimental film co-directed with Cristiana Miranda / 16 mm - Super 8 / 13’

Grey Seeds Experimental film co-directed with Bjarni Gunnarsson / HD / 8’

2011 Dead End Experimental film / HD / 1’

2010 No More Free Memory Experimental film co-directed with Marie Richeux Super 8 / 13’

2009 We Don’t Care About Music Anyway... Documentary co-directed with Gaspard Kuentz HD / 80’ Best Documentary on Art Award, ENH 2010 Creative Award, Traces de Vie 2010 One + One Award, Entrevues Belfort 2009

2008 L’homme qu’il faut à la place qu’il faut Documentary co-directed with Matthieu Imbert-Bouchard / DV / 65’

2005 Musafir Documentary co-directed with Pierre-Yves Perez / DV / 84’ Fatumbi Award, Bilan du film ethnographique Arts category Award, Sole Luna

the directors