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IFFI organisers bow to Telugu producers' demands

M S Shanker in Hyderabad

With the threat of boycott looming large, the organisers of the 30^th International Film Festival of India, which starts on Sunday, have bowed to demands by Tollywood veterans to include two Telugu films in the Indian Panorama.

There are 16 entries in the section; five from Kerala, three from Bengal, three from Bollywood and one each from Punjab, Assamese, Oriya, Tamil and Karnataka. There were none from the host state.

Well-known film producer Uppalapati Visweshwara Rao took IFFI director Malati Sahai to task, asking how this could happen when the film festival was being organised in Andhra Pradesh. He blamed the organisers for not involving people from the Telugu film industry in organisational matters.

It took the intervention of state Minister for Cinematography A Madhava Reddy, acting at the behest of Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, to amicably settle the matter.

Rao, who produced box-office hits like Harischandra, Teerpu, Marpu, Nagna Satyam and Desodharakulu, featuring NTR, Dadasaheb Phalke award-winner Akkineni Nageshwara Rao, was visibly upset about the lack of Telugu films in the Indian Panorama.

"It shows the arrogance of the organisers," the veteran film producer toldRediff On The Net.

He had the backing of other seniors of the industry like K B Tilak and Madhusudana Rao.

Ironically, Naidu seemed unaware of the selection process. The Union information and broadcasting ministry sets up a panel of movie-makers, journalists and other experts to help fill in the 21 slots in the Panorama. This year, the 13-member selection committee, headed by Vijaya Mehta, could take in just 15 entries.

Only one film, Girish Kesaravalli's Thai Saheb (Kannada), got in automatically because it won the 1998 National Award for the best film.

According to a senior IFFI official, the Panorama has never had its full complement of 21 entries in the last few years. Last year, there were only 13 and the year before that, 14. He also said it would not be possible now to include any more works in Panorama since that would be tantamount to questioning the committee's competency. But finally that is exactly what happened.

Another IFFI official said, "There is no scope for regional or linguistic considerations. The Panorama is meant to show the best of Indian films to a world gathering. Incidentally, though the Telugu film industry produces the maximum number of films, none of them could be considered for national award.''

But the film festival is finally set to take off; soon after the inauguration of the festival, Shekhar Kapoor's Elizabeth is to be screened at the Lalitha Kalathoranam tomorrow.

As many as 85 films from 45 countries are to be screened in what is known as the Cinema of World section.

The foreign retrospective, which seems a little unwieldy with about five different sub-sections, includes tributes to Hou Hsiao Hsien, the brilliant Taiwanese film-maker who focuses on human relations at various levels in his films, Hungarian film-maker Zsolt Kezdi Kovacs who has made several shorts and children's films, a solo film of the legendary Akira Kurosawa (Ikiru, 1952) and a centenary tribute to Eisenstein (Sergei Eisenstein: The Maxican Fantasy) in the Homage section.

There is also the Vision of India section, in which there is a package of seven films, including A Passage to India by David Lean, Gandhi by Richard Attenborough and The Mahabharat by Peter Brooks.

Apart from these there are two retrospectives as well 11 films by Wojciech Jerzy Has of Poland and seven by Roland Joffe, the American maverick director who made such brilliant films like The Killing Fields. His most recent film was City of Joy, with the story based on Calcutta.

Argentina will be the country "in focus" this year and among the films that ought not to be missed is Eiliseo Subiela's Despabilate Amod ( Wake Up Love).

There are four films from Russia, 12 from Poland, four from Germany and six from France. Iran, which missed the festival in Delhi last year, has sent five films and China, two. After the split in Yugoslavia, there is a rare entry from Croatia, titled Agony.

As usual, there is a strong package from America and Canada but a major disappoint for the Directorate of Film Festival is that there were few entries from the neighbouring countries. The star attractions are likely to be Elizabeth and Italian director Bernado Bertolucci's Besieged.

The DFF has decided to honour Bertolucci with a 'Lifetime Achievement Award' as this millennium comes to a close.

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