Arriving late is rarely considered a virtue in the real, practical world. The International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) arrives as the last of them all in the calendar year, in the lazy, wintry month of December. Arriving late happens to be one of its virtues, bringing to the cinema-crazy delegates here the best from all the festivals across the world through the year.
The tribe waiting to welcome the latecomer keeps increasing, with the number of delegates touching an all-time high of 13,000 this year. Vying for their attention will be 184 films from 64 countries, as the curtains go up across 13 cinema halls in the capital city on Friday.
Even as mainstream blockbusters are slowly taking a stranglehold of some major festivals in the country, the IFFK continues to stay close to the ideals with which it began, 21 winters ago. The curating of films here does not happen in a closed chamber, rather the events of the wider world influences each of the choices made here.
Major focus
Nothing perhaps reflects this than one of the major focuses of this year’s festival – Migration.
In the past year, we have been fed disturbing images of families running away from war-torn parts of the globe to safer pastures and some of them perishing on the way, of countries putting up fences to keep out humans who don’t look like them and of dead bodies of children being fished out of the waters.
The opening film itself, Parting , an Afghan-Iranian production directed by Navid Mahmoud, is based on the theme of migration. In addition, the migration package has six films.
The IFFK this year also has a package of LGBT films titled Gender Bender , consisting of six films from across the world, dealing with the theme. The idea of inclusiveness was not limited to just the screen, as this year, the festival introduced delegate passes for transgenders too.
Ken Loach, one of the strongest voices for the working class in world cinema, will be honoured with a retrospective, with his Cannes winner this year I, Daniel Blake being the icing.
The other major Cannes winners and competitors are all here, including Personal Shopper directed by Oliver Assayas (His Clouds of Sils Maria was a crowd favourite here in 2014), Graduation directed by Cristian Mungiu, It’s only the end of the world directed by Xavier Dolan, Paul Verhoeven’s Elle , Sieranevada directed by Cristi Puiu and festival favourite Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman .
Crowd favourites
The other crowd favourites including Fatih Akin, Dardenne Brothers and Pablo Larrain are there too. Among the Indian films to look forward to are Gurvinder Singh’s Chauthi Koot , Jayan Cherian’s Ka Bodyscapes , Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s The Bait and Konkona Sen Sharma’s Death in the Gunj . But, how can an IFFK be complete without a film by perhaps the only foreign film-maker to be mobbed on the streets of Thiruvananthapuram? Yes, Kim Ki Duk is back this year too with his latest work Net , said to be quite unlike his previous ones. But overlooking the small unknown films might be a mistake, as many a gem have popped from among them in the past years. Bina Paul Venugopal, who played a key part in taking the IFFK to its current stature by nurturing it over a decade, is back at the helm as the artistic director after a gap of two years.
On stage at Nishagandhi on the opening day, along with Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan and actor Amol Palekar will be legendary Czechoslovakian film-maker Jiri Menzel, whose films have always been warmly received by the IFFK audience.
The IFFK in its 21st edition promises to be bigger and better than over. A verdict on this will have to wait for a week.
