Yahoo News International Film Festival Of India Unveils 15-Title Competition Section, Including ‘Mediterranean Fever’, ‘When the Waves Are Gone’, ‘The Storyteller’
The International Film Festival Of India (IFFI) has announced the 15 films that will screen in competition at this year’s edition of the annual event, including recent festival favourites such as Maha Haj’s Mediterranean Fever and Lav Diaz’ When The Waves Are Gone, and three Indian films, including recent Busan premiere The Storyteller.
The selection of 12 international titles also includes Syrian filmmaker Soudade Kaadan’s Nezouh; Next Sohee, from South Korea’s Jung Ju-ri; Red Shoes, from Japan’s Toshiro Saiga; Cold As Marble, from Azerbaijan’s Asif Rustamov; Seven Dogs, from Argentina’s Rodrigo Guerrero; Ursula Meier’s The Line (La Ligne); Valentina Maurel’s I Have Electric Dreams, and two Iranian films – Dariush Mehrjui’s A Minor and Nader Saeivar’s No End.
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South Asia is also represented by Maarya: The Ocean Angel, about a group of fishermen disturbed by a sex doll they find in the sea, directed by Sri Lankan filmmaker Aruna Jayawardana.
The other two Indian titles are Hindi-language The Kashmir Files, directed by Ananth Narayan Mahadevan, a controversial drama about the exodus of the Hindu Pandit community from Kashmir in the 1990s, and Tamil-language Kurangu Pedal, directed by Kamalakannan S, centring on a father-son relationship in a South Indian village in the 1980s.
Ananth Narayan Mahadevan’s Hindi-language The Storyteller, based on a short story by Satyajit Ray, premiered in the Jiseok competition at this year’s Busan International Film Festival.
The 15 films will be competing for IFFI’s Golden Peacock Awards. The festival will open with Alma & Oskar, directed by Austria’s Dieter Berner, about the relationship between Viennese society grande dame Alma Mahler and Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka. The closing film is Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi’s Perfect Number.
The festival also announced a series of masterclasses, including with Kung Fu Panda director Mark Osborne, Indian actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui (The Lunchbox), Chennai-based director Mani Ratnam, who recently scored a hit with Ponniyin Selvan: 1, RRR writer Vijayendra Prasad and RRR editor Sreekar Prasad.
Organised by India’s National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), the festival will take place in Panjim, the capital of the state of Goa, India, from November 20-28.
Industry platform Film Bazaar, which has been organised annually by NFDC since 2007, will take place at the Goa Marriott Resort from November 20-24. Film Bazaar strands include a Work-in-Progress section, which has selected five titles, Co-production Market, showcasing 20 projects, and Film Bazaar Recommends, which presents a selection of recent Indian cinema to international programmers and distributors.
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