Kolkata International Film Festival to start from Nov 10

Kolkata: The 23rd Kolkata International Film Festival that will be held from November 10 to 17 will feature 142 movies from 65 countries under 19 categories.

The focus country of this year's KIFF will be Britain to commemorate the UK-India Year of Culture 2017. Apart from Classics and Contemporary films from UK, a retrospective movies of noted British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom will be the major attraction of the festival.

"We are planning to bring in Winterbottom to the city during the festival which will surely add a special dimension to the festival. Choosing Britain as the focus country for KIFF will surely give a boost to the Indo-UK ties," a senior official associated with KIFF said.

According to sources, the retrospective movies will include his 2011 film titled 'Trishna' that had Freida Pinto and Riz Ahmed in the lead. The film, which is supposed to be a loose adaptation of Thomas Hardy's 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles', is Winterbottom's third Hardy adaptation after 'Jude' and 'The Claim'.

The organisers are also trying desperately to bring in Winterbottom's most controversial film titled '9 Songs' that was shown at Cannes Film Festival. '9 Songs' is often regarded as the most sexually explicit mainstream film to have released in the UK till date. "We are also trying to screen 'The Killer Inside Me' that had depicted violence towards women in a gory manner" a source said

The organisers are also going to screen a rare Godard film which will be screened for the first time in the country. The movie, made in 1986 for television, was restored and shown in France cinema this year.

This year, a new competitive category has also been introduced – "Competition on Indian Language Films" – to encourage new ideas and new concepts to pioneer a change in the realm of cinema.

The festival will also see a package of seven Moroccan films. A delegation of actors, directors and producers from Morocco is expected to fly down to Kolkata to attend the festival.

In addition to these, the organisers are continuing with the usual competitive sections on NETPAC and Short & Documentary Films. The KIFF will be held in as many as a dozen cinema halls across the city including Salt Lake and Rajarhat.