Ravi's Night to honour the late founder of Sarnia film festival

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Family, friends and colleagues of the late founder of a Sarnia film festival are planning a film screening and party in his memory.

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Ravi’s Night, with two film screenings at Sarnia’s Imperial Theatre and a party at Collide on Front Street, will be held Nov. 18 as a tribute to Ravi Srinivasan, founder of the South Western International Film Festival (SWIFF). Srinivasan died in January.

Earlier this year, the festival’s board announced the festival, which began in 2015, would not continue.

“We just couldn’t bear the thought of not having something,” said Adam Cook, who worked with Srinivasan at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Sarnia event.

Admission to the films and the after-party will be free.

The film The King Tide will screen at 4:30 p.m. at the Imperial Theatre, followed at 7 p.m. by Do The Right Thing.

Free admission to the screenings is available online at ravisnight.eventbrite.ca.

Doors open at 9 p.m. for the after-party at Collide where there will be a cash bar.

Srinivasan, who grew up in Corunna and went on to work for the Toronto International Film Festival, created and led SWIFF, a multi-day event held each fall with film screenings at the Imperial Theatre and downtown Sarnia concerts and workshops attracting about 6,000 people in typical years.

Srinivasan died suddenly Jan. 14 at age 37.

Cook said travelling to Sarnia each November to be part of the festival with Srinivasan was an annual tradition for many of his friends and family.

“I think, if we were to just let November come and go, it would be devastating,” he said.

“It just made sense to try to do something that, I guess, paid tribute to the spirit of SWIFF.”

Along with a film screening, “we absolutely knew it was going to need a party,” Cook said.

The King Tide was screened this year at the Toronto International Film Festival but hasn’t been shown elsewhere yet, he said.

“That’s a film that would have been presented at SWIFF and exemplifies the kind of movies that Ravi would share,” Cook said.

Spike Lee’s Do The Right Things is “one of Ravi’s Top 10 favourite movies” and “captures in one movie, as best as we can, what Ravi believed in,” he said.

“I’ve never encountered anyone like him and I don’t know if I ever will again,” Cook said.

“He was a magnetic force of nature” with a “gravity to him that is like nothing else” and allowed him to mobilize communities, he said. “He mobilized SWIFF. He made a film festival exist out of thin air.”

The November event has been organized by Cook, Zenon Turczyn, who also was involved in SWIFF, along with Vivian Belik, Srinivasan’s partner, and Will Woods, who wrote and produced The King Tide. Cook said they also were supported by Srinivasan’s brother, Hari Srinivasan.