Conducting a
film festival every year that stands out for the quality of the movies showcased and making the entire
experience an absolute delight is a very demanding task. For Chaitanya Prasad,
Festival Director IFFI 2019 Goa, it is a very demanding task of putting
together a very large jigsaw puzzle.
Speaking to the
Herald he said “People’s expectations grow by the year. One has to also
consider that this is the 50th anniversary edition and people want to see
something special. So, we started working on the architecture of the entire
set-up very systematically. We also had to select films very carefully, and to
ensure that everybody gets to see the films they want to. The biggest plus
point this year was that we started our work much earlier than last
year.Together, we put the templates together, and the steering committee was
also excellent. It was a streamlined process.
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The presence of stars
like Wagner Moura who made his mark with the extremely popular series Narcos on
the platform Netflix was also striking. Chaitanya said “Wagner said he had just
come in from Portugal after having participated in the film festival there and
he said he was pleasantly surprised to see the same great films there being showcased
here. He said this festival was amongst the best he had attended and the
selection of the movies was top notch”. Wagner Moura has a reputation of being
hard left and his directorial debut has been banned in Brazil but is being
showcased here at the festival. The Festival Director said they were not
concerned by the personal politics of the actor or the director but more by the
quality of the final product. When asked how he managed to get the excellent
films showcased at Cannes, Rome and London here, he said the film festival had
a reputation which helped him in his job.
Their objective of
the Oscar Retrospective was achieved because of the respect commanded by the
Indian film festival. Asked how they selected a movie, he said “We were guided
by the steering committee, and there was an Indian Panorama section. They were
giving us templates for a perfect blend of classic cinema, and the Oscar
retrospective, and Kaleidoscope which focuses on contemporary cinema, and then
there’s the Masters section.”
He
went on to say that work for the next edition of IFFI would commence
immediately and the feedback as well as the ideas presented by delegates would
be considered seriously and then incorporated. It was a job of passion done by
people who loved their cinema, said the Festival Director as the curtains came
down on the 50th IFFI
