Goa: The IFFI fever has hit the party capital of India- Goa. With the 45th edition of International Film Festival of India (IFFI) all set to kickstart from November 20, 2014, the people in the state must be feeling all lucky and star-struck.
The megastars will attend the inauguration ceremony at the Syama Prasad Mookerjee indoor stadium on the outskirts of the state capital on November 20. The news of the presence at IFFI platform has raised the bar for obvious reasons.
While Big B will be the chief guest at the event, the Nizam of the Southern cinema Rajinikanth will be present to accept the Centenary award for Indian Film personality of the year at a ceremony which will be attended attended Union ministers for Information and Broadcasting Arun Jaitley (cabinet) Rajyavardhan Rathore (state) and Goa chief 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 governments in the recent past.
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).
A special section of films that focus on dance, personality based retrospectives, and Masterclasses or specialized workshops conducted by master artistes will also form a part of IFFI 2014. This positioning of China as a guest 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 the Chinese President Xi Jinping earlier this year.
The organization of the latest edition of IFFI has also seen its share of controversy, with the main opposition party, the Congress, alleging a tendering scam in creation of temporary infrastructure for the event, a charge which the organisers have rubbished.
The festival will also pay tribute to British film maker Richard Attenborough, the maker of the iconic film Gandhi who died in August this year. His Academy Award winning film ‘Gandhi’ is also one of those films which will be screened to the general audience (non delegates) free of cost every day.
Bureau Report
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