Winners of the long-delayed and much-awaited 66th national film awards are likely to be announced soon with the jury meeting and deliberations scheduled to start from August 7 onwards at New Delhi’s Siri Fort auditorium.
“They will be announced within a week,” said a source. The awards were postponed this year due to the Lok Sabha election.
According to sources, the non-feature film awards and the best writing on cinema awards had been locked before the election.
On the other hand, though the viewings had been completed by the feature films jury, no deliberations had been done when the postponement was announced by the Information and Broadcasting Ministry. Even after the elections, the meeting could not be convened because two members of the feature films jury were out of the country.
Earlier, in a press release dated April 24, the Ministry said that “since the Model Code of Conduct [MCC] is in force, which facilitates level playing field to all political parties and the candidates and inter alia seeks to ensure that the power of media is not used in such a manner which affects the general conduct and level playing field during the election process, it has been decided to declare the awards after the election process is over and the MCC concludes.”
Every year the winners of the awards, organised and presented by the Directorate of Film Festivals, are announced in April and the presentation ceremony is held on the designated date, May 3, which is when India’s first feature film — Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra — is said to have had its theatrical release in 1913 at the Coronation Cinematograph and Variety Hall, Girgaon.
Unlike this year, during the previous general election in 2014, the 61st national film awards were announced as per schedule on April 16 and were presented on May 3.
