An IFFI Show

Ironically, the two films which really blew one away were non-features in a section meant to focus on fiction. Lee Hirsh’s Amandla, which documented the essential part played by music during the fight against apartheid in South Africa, and Anna Maria Tato’s brilliant bio-pic on Marcello Mastroianni, I Remember Yes I Remember. From the 20 films in Panorama, only two or three made the grade: Mani Ratnam’s lush look at troubles in Jaffna from a Tamil point-of-view Kannathil Muthamittal, and Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Manda Meyer Upakhyan, a lyrical, sensuously sparse story about freedom and oppression. Other inclusions from such masters as Mrinal Sen, Shaji N Karun, and Jahnu Barua merely served to disappoint.

There were also Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai (DCH), Revathy’s Mitr My Friend, and Madhur Bhandharkar’s Chandni Bar, all of which had commercial releases and a fair amount of box-office success. If you’re going to have these movies in the Panorama as well, what is a ‘Mainstream’ section for?

As always there were more cops, security personnel, organisers from the various arms of the I&B ministry infesting Siri Fort, rivalling in number the Press and delegates. And how do they connect with films and film people? By not recognising Adoor Gopalakrishan when he shows up at the media centre. The mild-mannered Adoor is feted around the world but he gets asked where he is from, by an official ignoramus.

This year, the idea of a permanent venue which has been around for several years, seems to be firming up. The travelling circus which went, by turns, to such major film centres as Chennai, Bangalore, Thiruvananthpuram, Kolkata, Mumbai, returning to the Capital every alternate year, has seen narrower options with time.

Kerala has its own festival, so does Kolkata as well as Mumbai, and these are thriving as rapidly as the IFFI is sinking. It could even be Goa, hinted one of the 20 people, all of whom were in charge of the media desk (three people do the work, the rest pfaff and drink the official tea provided free for Press and delegates). There are rumours that J Jayalalithaa has made a strong pitch for Chennai, for next year. Here we go again, around the mulberry bush.

It is also the first time the IFFI is being held in October. Last year, when Bangalore was meant to host it in autumn, it got cancelled for specious reasons. The official reason for the shift from January to October, is that all major films bypassed New Delhi in January as work stops in the West during Christmas and New Year. Then there was Berlin, the big festival which kickstarts the year.

But the shift in dates has not meant the latest nor the best for us: Locarno and Toronto, both take place in August-September, and both had some of the most exciting new films this year, including India’s latest films. Aparna Sen’s Mr and Mrs Iyer got rave reviews at the former, and Deepa Mehta showed her Hollywood Bollywood at the latter. Toronto also gave pride of place to the latest Asian cinema — there were films from the flourishing South Korean industry (we also got one from S Korea which must have been included to keep the heavy-breathers happy, with its long tracts of explicit full-frontal nudity and innovative sex acts). What the IFFI got for its Asian competition section was a bunch of second-string films which generated zero excitement.

We have again fallen through the cracks — now the best films will circumvent New Delhi and go to the prestigious London Film Festival, which opens in November. There has been a steady decline in the kind of international movies and filmmakers fetching up in New Delhi during January, but at least our place in the calendar had been clearly demarcated ever since the IFFI began in the early ’50s. Today, we are neither her nor there.

It comes down, as it always does, to the selection procedures and criteria, and their astonishing lack of transparency. Regional political satraps force rank bad movies into the Panorama; non-film people swan off to choose international movies; and we get whatever we can for the Retrospectives. At a measly Rs 2.75 crore allocated for the 10-day event, truncated from the usual 15 days, we have neither the prestige nor the money to attract the best and the brightest. Halfway through there was a belated, unofficial acknowledgement within the I&B echelons that the festival was a turkey and there were unofficial pleas made to the film trade people to rescue it, but by then it was much too late.