On Thursday, if you are in Goa, you may just be in chance to collect some stardust.
The 45th edition of the IFFI, which got underway Thursday, hosts Rajini-kanth and Amitabh Bachchan who are the part of the inauguration cere-mony at the Syama Prasad Mookerjee Indoor Stadium on the outskirts of the state capital.
While Big B is the chief guest at the event, the czar of the Southern cinema Rajinikanth will be presen-ted with Centenary Award for Indian Film personality of the year. The ceremony will be attended by Information and Broad-casting Minister Arun Jaitley, Minister of state for I&B Rajyavardhan Rat-hore and Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, among others.
Bachchan’s entry this year is significant because the tenure of his absence from IFFI, India’s biggest state-backed film festival, has coincided with his falling out with the Congress-led central gover-nments in the recent past.
“The President” directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf will be the opening film of the fest, and “The Grandmaster” by Wong Kar-wai, who will inciden-tally receive the lifetime achievement award, will be the closing film of the festival.
The 11-day festival will also screen 179 films from 75 countries across different categories which include World Cinema (61 films), Masterstrokes (11 films), Festival Kaleidoscope (20 films), Soul of Asia (7 films), Documentaries (6 films), and Animated Films (6 films).
The Indian Panorama section will include 41 feature and non-feature films. Seven films from India’s northeastern region will also be screened at the event as part of a special package.
“In all, sixtytwo films in the world cinema section will be screened, while 15 films will be screened in the IFFI’s competition section this year,” says IFFI director Shankar Mohan, who is a senior official of the Information and Broad-casting Ministry.
Retrospective sections on Gulzar and Jahnu Baruah, special homage films on Richard Atten-borough, Robin Williams, Zohra Sehgal, Suchitra Sen, and a special tribute to Farooq Sheikh would be other attractions this year.
A special section of films that focus on dance, personality based retros-pectives, and Master-classes or specialized work-shops conducted by master artistes will also form part of the IFFI 2014.
The positioning of China as a focus country at this year’s event is a result of cinematic partnership as envisioned in an India-China agreement signed between the two countries when Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosted Chinese President Xi Jinp-ing earlier this year.
The organisation of the latest edition of IFFI has also seen its share of contro-versy, with the main oppo-sition party, the Congress, alleging a scam in tendering in creation of temporary infrastructure for the event, a charge which the organi-sers have rubbished.(IANS)
