CITY TO BE BIG SCREEN FOR REGIONAL FILMS

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Bhubaneswar: More than 40 award-winning and critically acclaimed movies are to be screened at the 9th Indian Film Festival Bhubaneswar (IFFB) scheduled from February 14 to 20. The festival is being held at Idcol Auditorium by Film Society of Bhubaneswar (FSB) in association with Kerala State Chalachitra Academy and National Film Archives. The focus of the festival, the organisers said, will be on screening films from different regions of the country made over the last few years. “Every year we have remarkable films made in various Indian languages.

They generally go unnoticed as regional cinema. But they give Indian cinema a distinct identity. The cinema we generally get to see in theatres, generally product of film industries in Mumbai and south India, forms only a small part of the bigger picture,” FSB secretary Subrat Behura said. Independent film-maker and FSB organizing committee member Amartya Bhattacharya, too, avers that cinema is not restricted to any language, especially in India, which has more than 22 official languages and films being made in each of these every year. “Many of these films are well acclaimed at film festivals abroad but at home these are barely appreciated. Some films even don’t get released, thanks to the masala movies created in the name of entertainment,” he said. “If we feel people in one state should have access to literature, theatre, dance, music and folk and classical art traditions from other states to understand these, then the same must hold true for cinema too. It should form a necessary part of our education and an integral part of our idea of India. If we feel there is a need to read the works of Premchand or Gopinath Mohanty, then there is also a need to see the films of G Aravindan and others,” Amartya added.

The films to be featured at the festival have received much acclaim at national and international levels for their artistic merit and socio-cultural relevance. “They engage with and depict in meaningful, thought-provoking manner contemporary concerns such as caste and gender inequality, ecological and environmental degradation, and political and economic changes,” FSB president Subhash Das said. The festival is to also feature some contemporary works from the East and the Northeast (Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Manipuri, Khasi and Oriya); South (Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil); West (Marathi); and North (Hindi and Punjabi). Some of the award winning films included are ‘Kutrame Thandanai’ (crime is punishment) by M Manikandan, ‘Merku Thodarchi Malai’ (Western ghats) by Lenin Bharathi (both Tamil), ‘Munro Thuruthu’ (Munroe Island) by Manu (Malayalam), ‘Capital I’ by Amarthya (Oriya), ‘Masaan’ by Neeraj Ghaywan (Hindi). Girish Kasaravalli, the acclaimed film-maker from Karnataka will be the chief guest at the event. Some of the films made by noted Malayalam film-maker G Aravindan will be screened at the festival as a tribute. Also, noted film-makers will conduct workshops and classes for students at the event. The film festival will encourage young film-makers from east India to make good movies, actor-producer Swostik Choudhury said.