Puri, February 25: The 12th edition of Bring Your Own Film Festival (BYOFF), which saw the convergence of a large number of film lovers and budding filmmakers to the venue in Puri came to an end Wednesday. The concluding day of the national-level film festival witnessed a sizeable crowd that thronged the venue to bid adieu to the fest that quenched their thirst for both knowledge and recreation and in the final analysis, kept them entertained for five consecutive days.
Musical performances and stage shows marked the last evening of BYOFF 2015. And of course there was that promise to meet again.
“A heap of musical performances were held Wednesday to mark the concluding day. We have garnered a great response this time for our festival. Workshops for budding filmmakers by industry experts were the most unique part of this year’s festival; those helped to attract a good crowd of budding talents. In our time we never got the opportunity to be trained by renowned and critically acclaimed filmmakers. This year we tried to fill that void through specialised workshops on filmmaking and cinematography,” says Surya Shankar, organizing member, BYOFF.
Once the sun set, the stage performances that were lined up for the evening enthralled the audience. Stage performance of Kevin, a classical guitarist from the United States, mesmerised the audience. Similarly, violin performance by Selix and rendition of folk songs by Harpreet Singh took the musical evening to a new high. Some local artists from Puri too performed on stage; their presence added local flavour to the concluding day.
These apart, screening of more than 10 movies was lined up for the filmmakers who also came to see movies on diverse topics other than screening their own films.
Devvrat Mishra, a budding filmmaker who took part in filmmaking workshop said, “This year the festival was outstanding. We took part in the filmmaking workshop by renowned filmmaker Sushant Mishra and got ourselves acquainted with different facets of filmmaking. Meanwhile, we were shown some path-breaking movies like Breathless by Jean-Luc Godard and films by Japense director Yasujiro Ozu where we came to know about some of the very minute and unique experiments (made) in (the field of film) direction. This was a very fruitful event for us.”
The five-day event witnessed numerous workshops, screening of different movies, musical performances during evenings, various stalls, including those catering mouthwatering eatables, among other attractions which kept the visitors glued to the venue. Officials said that the next edition of BYOFF would be organised around the same time, a year after.
