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Goanet mourns the passing of Jorge de Abreu Noronha in Portugal - Nov 27/07 http://tinyurl.com/2dk2bl http://tinyurl.com/29kpdx --------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/msid-2587924.cms IFFI: Sun, sand and some seriousness Comment Mail to friend By: Saibal Chatterjee, TNN Indian cinema - indeed India itself - has changed beyond recognition. But the nation's official international film festival, an embodiment of immutability, continues to cling on to the past. The more the world changes the more the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) remains the same. The ongoing 38 th edition of the IFFI, in its fourth straight year in Goa, is no different from what the 25 th or the 26 th IFFI were. It was a drab sarkari event and it still is a dreary sarkari event. Bureaucracy reigns supreme. The festival bumbles along from one crisis to another, one controversy to another. But should we write off the annual event as a dead loss? Certainly not, especially when IFFI has managed this year to miraculously pull itself back from the brink of redundancy by going back to the basics. When the festival was first held in the Nehruvian era, it was envisaged as a bridge between Indian films and the best of world cinema. Gloss and glamour weren't what the founding fathers of the film festival were looking for. Had that been the case, IFFI this year would have showcased Farah Khan's blockbuster Om Shanti Om rather than an otherwise impossible-to- access Manipuri or Assamese film. There are only two Hindi films in the Indian Panorama this year. Neither of them has any Bollywood leanings. Bhavna Talwar's Dharm and Sameer Hanchate's Gafla, both provide a take on issues of social import. They may not be earth-shatteringly outstanding pieces of cinema, but they are, for all they are worth, rooted in reality and have something to say about the world around them. That, let's face it, is no mean feat these days and deserves to be feted. One is happy to report that IFFI has put programming back where it belongs - at the very centre of the festival. The greatest thing that Neelam Kapur, the current IFFI director, and her team have done is to keep mainstream Bollywood away. That has helped IFFI reclaim its tag as a pure film festival, devoted to celebrating the medium rather than just the stars who parade across the screen. The 38 th IFFI hasn't been just another starstudded show, where Bollywood starlets get to grab their 15 minutes of fame, as they had done during the first three years of the film festival's life in Goa. With the carnival spirit at low ebb, the festival, despite the chaos and mismanagement that interminably plague it, has once again turned into an opportunity for avid film watchers to savour quality cinema in peace and exchange notes with others of their ilk. "IFFI is definitely improving," master filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan told this correspondent during the course of an informal conversation. "The challenge now will lie in fulfilling the expectation of further improvement in the years ahead." Coming from Adoor, a staunch opponent of the Bollywoodisation of IFFI and of the move to reduce the festival to a tourism event, the approbation carries immense weight. Festival director Neelam Kapur insists that the IFFI programming this year is of the highest order. "It's as fine a line-up as any," she says. "Sadly, the media makes the festival seem much worse than it actually is." She may actually be right. The electronic media has indeed sought to dismiss the latest edition of the festival as a flop show simply because Bollywood stars haven't descended on the venue. But no festival that brings together the latest works of directors like Bille August, Aki Kaurismaki and Alain Corneau, among others , besides presenting mini retrospectives of Ingmar Bergman and Volker Schlondorff can ever be a waste of time for those who have a passion of true cinema. Some locals in the know admit that while Goa may be about fun, football and fenni, films are furthest from the people's minds. In other words, the state doesn't have an entrenched cinema culture. But why should that bother anybody? When the Cannes Film Festival began its journey 60 years ago, the town that hosts it was a nondescript fishing port. Today, Cannes is where the world goes to fish for the biggest movie deals. There is no reason to believe that Goa can't be developed into a major film festival venue. "Goa is a great place for a film festival," says Adoor. "The weather is great, the people are wonderful and the ambience is getting better by the day." But he feels that the programming needs to improve drastically. "There was a time when the festival invited hot professional selectors from around the world to handpick the best films. Today, it has to make do largely with films that are available on a platter." That is probably why there is an inordinate amount of tokenism at IFFI. A Bergman retrospective has only seven films, while the Schlondorff homage is even worse off with only three films making up the sidebar. IFFI this year pays a tribute to veteran Manipuri filmmaker Aribam Syam Sharma with only a single film, Ishanou. The Adoor Gopalakrishnan Master Class, too, has only one film - Vidheyan . Worse still, the special event is unthinkingly scheduled for the early afternoon. A well-intentioned homage to recently deceased cinematographer KK Mahajan suffers from the same malaise - the Directorate of Film Festivals has managed to acquire a solitary film (Basu Chatterjee's Sara Akash) to speak for the late technician's hugely influential work. So there we go again - "making IFFI look worse than it really is" . To be honest, IFFI regulars like this writer have seen much worse. Last year was particularly bad, with too many Bollywood stars being allowed a free run of the venue, which turned the festival into a full-fledged tamasha that left genuine cineastes completely out of the equation. Getting into a theatre to watch a film was an obstacle race. Chaos was the theme of IFFI last year. Many of the rough edges have vanished this year. All registration, both for the media and for the industry, has gone online and while it wasn't smooth sailing all the way, it did streamline things to a great extent. But that old debate continued to rage: should the government bail out of the film festival and leave its conduct in the hands of private players ? Opinion, as usual, was divided, but filmmakers, especially from the regional centres, insisted that the government must keep the reins or else the film festival would become another glitzy Bollywood event that would be more about the stars and less about cinema. Their question: don't we have enough of that in this country already? Indeed. So leave IFFI alone. What it needs is a larger infusion of funds and a more meaningful public-private partnership to drag it out of the doldrums. It doesn't need a major surgery - that would be fatal. A bout of gentle tweaking will do.