It was a festival that almost did not happen. In the weeks that followed the unprecedented floods that hit the State, it was a given that the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) along with some other cultural events would be cancelled.
For a cash-strapped State on the path of recovery and rebuilding, with almost every other citizen in the State making monetary contributions to it, there was hardly anything left to spend for culture.
Fundraising
That the curtains will go up on the 23rd edition of the film festival at Nishagandhi in Thiruvananthapuram on Friday evening is in no small measure due to the determination of the film buffs of the State, who are literally funding the festival this time with their delegate fee, along with sponsorship from a few government and private organisations.
Post-tsunami Tokyo
Naysayers, who are against holding a festival in a disaster year, are often told the story of the Tokyo International Film Festival of 2011, held soon after the great earthquake and tsunami that hit east Japan.
The then Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, who was at the inaugural, saw it as part of the country’s path to recover physically and psychologically, talking at length on the power of cinema to inspire recovery efforts.
Despite radiation fears, the festival that year witnessed a record attendance.
Similar was the case of the Shanghai Film Festival of 2008, held soon after a massive earthquake.
The jury chairman Wong Kar Wai and Jackie Chan made a public appeal, which fetched donations for the millions who were rendered homeless after the tragedy.
It might be just a coincidence that Shanghai had a retrospective of Ingmar Bergman that year, just like the IFFK this year.
Open forum intact
The IFFK has always prided itself as a government-funded festival, with no commercial interests seeping in, unlike some other major film festivals. That has reflected in the content, with its clear, unwavering focus on Third World countries. The open forum, a unique feature of the festival, continues to be a platform where hard questions can still be raised. For the Kerala State Chalachitra Academy, the main organisers of the festival, the ever-increasing numbers of the delegates have been a challenge in recent years, with not enough seats to accommodate everyone. A limit was set from last year, but with the delegate fee hike this year, the number of delegates would be fewer.
The fare on offer
This time around, the IFFK will screen 164 films, including many international award-winners and Oscar nominees, from 72 countries across 13 venues in the State capital. A total of 386 screenings will be held over the next week. Working within tight budgets, the academy has but managed to bring the best of the fare available this year to the festival, including major festival winners like Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma , Sergey Loznitsa’s Donbass and Wanuri Kahiu’s Rafiki . The presence of Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi at the festival, as its jury chairman and as the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award, is something to look forward to for his legion of admirers here.
The year would also mark the complete shift of the film festival to the digital format, with not even a single screening from a film print. The package ‘The Human Spirit’, with six films on hope and rebuilding, would ensure that IFFK plays the role that art is supposed to play, in times of crisis and tragedy.
