The 47th International Film Festival of India (IFFI) will begin here on Sunday as a nine-day event as against 11 days in the previous years.
The Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF) and the Entertainment Society of Goa (ESG), the Goa government’s entertainment body are the organisers of the event.
DFF director K. Senthil Kumar told reporters on Saturday that for the first time, the festival would include several films in the running for the Academy Awards, besides a selection of films screened at the Cannes film festival. “The attendance will be thin if we stretch it for 11 days. Guests and delegates come for a package of three-four days. So we try to give them a four-five day package over nine days, and in the nine days, we will try to have more films,” he said.
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M. Venkaiah Naidu, Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting, will inaugurate the festival, in the presence of Bollywood director Ramesh Sippy, at the Dr. Shama Prasad Mukherjee Stadium. Actor and film-maker Ajay Devgn will be the chief guest at the opening ceremony and director S.S. Rajamouli at the closing ceremony. S.P. Balasubrahmanyam, who has served the film industry for five decades as a playback singer, actor and director, will be presented with the Centenary Award for Indian Film Personality of the Year.
The festival, held annually in Goa since 2004, will open with the screening of Afterimage , written and directed by Polish film-maker Andrzej Wajda, who died on October 9 this year. It is a biopic on Wladyslaw Strzeminski, a Polish avant-garde painter. It will close on November 28 with Age of Shadows by Kim Jee-woon, a South Korean director.
The organisers said they dropped sections that did not fit in with the programming format and have included new formats. This year’s festival includes more than 300 films from 90 countries. There would be no Pakistani film screening because the entries did not make the cut, Mr. Kumar said. South Korea is the special focus country this year.
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