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Much anticipated new titles from both established masters and promising newbies, besides three major retrospectives, are among the cinematic riches being showcased at the 45th International Film Festival of India, being held in Goa.
Besides hosting exciting retrospectives of the late Polish master Krzysztof Kieslowski, Iranian great Mohsen Makhmalbaf and South Korean auteur Jeon Soo-il, IFFI 2014, is paying a special tribute to veteran Swedish director Jan Troell by screening his 2008 film, Everlasting Moments. While the festival opened with Makhmalbaf’s latest work, The President, it is scheduled to close on November 30 with a screening of globally celebrated Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai’s The Grandmaster. At the closing ceremony, IFFI will bestow its Lifetime Achievement Award on Wong Kar Wai. At 56, the director is the youngest ever to win the prize. The last two winners — Jiri Menzel (2013) and Krzysztof Zanussi (2012) — were both septuagenarians.
China is IFFI’s ‘focus country’ this year and nine titles capturing the diversity and dynamism of Chinese cinema are being showcased by the festival. Among these films are Chen Kaige’s Caught in the Web and Peter Chan’s American Dreams in China. Courtesy the Polish Film Institute, those attending IFFI 2014 are also being treated to a special exhibition of posters of Kieslowski’s films drawn from different parts of the world where his work had a following. Besides Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique and Three Colours: Blue, the retrospective includes four parts of his famed Dekalog, plus one of the two longer films that emerged from the series, A Short Film About Killing.
India’s premier film festival, an 11-day event which has now found a permanent home in Goa, has programmed the winners of the top prizes this year from Berlin, Cannes and Venice as well as the film that bagged the People’s Choice Award of the Toronto International Film Festival 2014. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep (Palme d’Or, Cannes), Roy Andersson’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (Golden Lion, Venice), Diao Yinan’s Black Coal Thin Ice (Golden Bear, Berlin) and Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game (Grolsch People’s Choice Award, Toronto) are being screened in different sections of IFFI 2014. Also in the festival programme are Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan, winner of the Best Screenplay prize in Cannes; Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, winner of the Best Director prize in Cannes; Andrei Konchalovsky’s The Postman’s White Nights, winner for best direction in Venice; and Rakhsan Banietemad’s Tales, which won the Best Screenplay nod in Venice. Clearly, for film lovers, the 2014 edition of IFFI is the place to be. In the Festival Kaleidoscope section, which is devoted to films that have been feted around the world throughout the year, the audience will have a score of titles to choose from. Among these are Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home, Rolf de Heer’s Charlie’s Country, Lech Majewski’s Field of Dogs, Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language, Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall and the Dardenne brothers’ Two Days One Night.
If that were not enough, IFFI also has a section called Masterstrokes, which has 12 new films from some of the biggest names of world cinema. In this mix are films by Olivier Assayas (Clouds of Sils Maria), Peter Chan (Dearest), Denys Arcand (An Eye for Beauty), Krzysztof Zanussi (Foreign Body), Mike Leigh (Mr Turner), Lars von Trier (Nymphomaniac — Director’s Cut) and Kim Ki-duk (One on One). In the festival’s Cinema of the World section, too, the audience will have a wide array of must-watch films to savour. Recommended titles here include Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida, Dan Wolman’s The Director’s Angst, Batin Ghobadi’s Mardan, Liv Ullmann’s Miss Julie and Wang Xiaoshuai’s Red Amnesia. One film that would be of special interest to most IFFI delegates is James Marsh’s The Theory of Everything, starring Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking. It is adapted from Jane Hawking’s book, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen, which records the great English physicist’s love story. Also in the Cinema of the World section are films such as Reza Mirkarimi’s Today, John Boorman’s Queen and Country, Susanne Bier’s A Second Chance and Ruben Ostlund’s Turist, which won a prize in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section earlier this year. In IFFI’s International Competition section, two heavyweights — Russia’s Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan) and Mauritania’s Abderrahmane Sissako (Timbuktu) will be in contention for the Golden Peacock, alongside 13 other lesser-known names. Two Indian films — Bengali director Kaushik Ganguly’s Chotoder Chobi (A Short Story) and debutant Shrihari Sathe’s Marathi film, Ek Hazarachi Note (1000 Rupee Note) — are in the competition. The five-member jury of the festival is headed by noted cinematographer Slawomir Idziak and includes Indian actress Seema Biswas. Among the competition films, Cuba’s Behaviour (director Ernesto Darnas), Turkey’s Fish (director Dervis Zaim) and Azerbajan’s Nabat (director Elchin Musaoglu) are tipped to be among the frontrunners. In two interesting firsts, IFFI 2014 will be screening "a film without a country" — Palestinian-Israeli writer-director Suha Arraf’s Villa Touma — and a feature film whose dialogues are entirely in sign language — Ukrainian director Miroslav Slaboshpitskiy’s The Tribe.
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