Kolkata Film Festival to offer best of World Cinema

The 21st edition of the Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF), organised by the State I& CA Department,  has grown in stature in the past three years and this year promises to be more exciting. It will be starry affair right from day I, with the likes of Amitabh Bachchan, Jaya Bachchan, Sharmila Tagore, Moushumi Chatterjee and Vidya Balan, among other celebrities, gracing the inaugural ceremony on November 14.

The biggest incentive for cine buffs, for example, is the screening of Carlos Saura’s ‘Zonda, folclore argentino’. This is the first film festival in India that will get to screen the Spanish master’s latest movie.

A few months ago, West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee had sent a delegation to the Cannes Film Festival to facilitate the selection of good films for the KIFF. The efforts seem to have paid off. The organisers have managed to get quite a few award-winning films from this year’s Cannes, Berlin and Venice film festivals, including Jafar Panahi’s Iranian drama titled ‘Taxi’, which won the Golden Bear and the FIPRESCI Prize at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival. 

Then there is Tsai Ming-liang’s ‘Afternoon’ that was screened at this year’s Venice International Film Festival as well as Alexander Sokurov’s 2015 French drama titled `Francofonia’ (screened at the main competition section of the 72nd Venice International Film Festival). Nanni Moretti’s ‘Mia Madre’, Takeshi Miike’s ‘Yakuza Apocalypse: The Great War of the Underworld’ and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s ‘The Assassin’ are a part of the KIFF screening list. 

Bachchan’s inaugural speech at last year’s KIFF was one of the most-talked-about subjects related to the film festival.