Day 3 of IFFB: More Film Festivals Needed

On the third day of 12th Indian Film Festival Bhubaneswar (IFFB) at Guru Kelu Charan Mohapatra Odissi Research Centre, Wednesday Kamal KM, a leading name of Malayalam films said that there is a need to organise more film festivals in India as they encourage the budding filmmakers to work on themes that strongly relate to rural life. He further said that this is the way he and his contemporaries used to learn the craft, by watching movies together and engaging in long discussions on the theme, subject matter, plot and such things. “Film festivals are platforms where we get to discover contemporary cinema,” the filmmaker added.

On the third day of the festival, Kamal’s highly acclaimed film Pada, a socio-political thriller based on a true incident that occurred in 1996 when the then Palakkad collector was held hostage was screened on the occasion.

Three more movies Apur Sansar (Satyajit Ray), Be Ches Ne Veth (I am not the river Jhelum), the only Kashmiri language movie of the festival directed by Prabhas Chandra and Abhinandan Banerjee’s Bangla movie Manikbabur Megh (The Cloud and the Man) were also exhibited on day 3.

Be Ches Ne Veth explores the suffocation and trauma experienced by its protagonist Afeefa, a Kashmiri woman, in her life while Manikbabur Megh tells the tale of a recently-bereaved middle-aged man and his accidental, complex yet meaningful relationship with a cloud.