Actress Sharada will be the chief guest at the opening ceremony of 24th International Film festival Of Kerala (IFFK) which begins on December 6 at Thiruvananthapuram’s Nishagandhi auditorium. The 8-day event will be inaugurated by Chief Minister of the State, Pinarayi Vijayan.
Sharada, 74, was the first actress from the Malayalam film industry to have won a National Award for Best Actress. She has won the honour thrice — for Thulabharam (1968), Swayamvaram (1972) and Nimajjanam (1977). The thespian has also won the Kerala State Film Awards in 1970 for Thriveni and Thara. Besides Malayalam, she has also acted in Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, and Hindi films.
This year, IFFK will felicitate Argentine filmmaker Fernando Solanas whose five films will be screened at the festival. Solanas is known for his vast body of work that documents the collective political unrest in Latin America. At the end of the 1960s, Solanas, and his friend Octavio Getino founded the Grupo Cine Liberación, aimed at creating a collective creation process and resist political oppression, and developed the theory of Third Cinema as an alternative to American and European cinema.
This year, the film festival will screen over 180 films in fourteen venues across the city. There will be retrospectives of Sharada’s films, we well as of late filmmakers Mrinal Sen, Lenin Rajendran and Gireesh Karnad, and late cinematographer MJ Radhakrishnan. This year, the delegate fee has been fixed at Rs 1000, 50 per cent lesser than last year’s fee. The delegate registration begins on November 8. For those who register post-November 25, the fee will be Rs 1500.
Also read: Interview With IFFK Artistic Director Bina Paul: “We Have Always Been A Cinephiles’ Festival”
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Meanwhile, a group of indie filmmakers have launched a social media campaign against the International Film Festival Of Kerala (IFFK), alleging that the festival’s film selection committee has been flouting rules and rejecting films without viewing them. On their Facebook page, Reform The IFFK, the filmmakers say that they are going to file a legal petition against the film festival to get the current selection lists of Indian and Malayalam films cancelled. They demand that the Academy reconstitute the panels and make fresh and fair selections. The filmmakers also allege that the Chalachitra Academy was favouring commercial films over independent arthouse films.