NEW DELHI: The Indian Panorama, the flagship component of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), on Saturday announced the selection of 25 feature films and 20 non-feature films to be showcased at the 53rd film festival in Goa from November 20 to 28.
Hadinelentu, a Kannada movie directed by Prithvi Kohanur, is the opening Indian feature film while ‘The show must go on’ in English directed by Divya Cowasji is the opening Indian non-feature film.
WAGRO, a non-feature film in Konkani, directed by Goa’s Sainath S Uskaikar, will also be screened at the film festival. In a post on his social media, Uskaikar reminisced about his experience at Goa’s first ever IFFI in 2004, when he was a kid in school. “It was like a theme park, a first-time experience for me,” he said, expressing joy that a short film directed by him was now the lone selection from Goa. Incidentally, WAGRO was also screened at the Raindance Film Festival, London, and at the Cannes Film Festival in France
this year.
The feature films include five from the mainstream cinema section -- The Kashmir Files in Hindi, directed by Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri, Dharamveer---Mukkam Post Thane in Marathi directed by Pravin Vitthal Tarde, Tonic in Bengali by Avijit Sen, RRR (Roudram Ranam Rudhiram) by S S Rajmouli and Akhanda by Boyapati Srinivasa Rao, both Telugu films.
Those making it to the feature films include four Hindi movies Three of Us (by Avinash Arun Dhaware), The storyteller (by Ananth Marayan Mahadevan), Major (by Sashi Kiran Tikka) and Siya (by Manish Mundra), besides three in Marathi, namely Frame by Vikram Patwardhan, Sher Shivaji by Digpal Lanjekar and Ekda Kaay Zala by Dr Saleel Kulkarni, three in Tamil, namely Kurangu Pedal by Kamalakannan S, Kida by R A Venkat and Jai Bhim by Tha. Se. Gnanavel, two in Telugu, namely Cinema Bandi by Kandregula Praveen and Kudhiram Bose by Vidya Sagar Raju, as also two each in Kannada, Malayalam, one each in Bengali, Oriya and Maithili.
There is also a feature film Dhabari Quruvi by Priyanandanan in Irula language, a Dravidian language which is spoken by the tribal people in the Nilgiri mountains of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka. Seven of the non-feature films are in English, five in Hindi, besides one each in Kannada, Malayalam, Manipuri, Sanskrit, Tamil, Bhotiya and Marathi (Rekha by Shekhar Bapu Rankhambe).