NEW DELHI: About 200 films from countries like Spain, Italy, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the United States, and Australia apart from India will be screened during the First Guwahati International Short Film Festival (GISFF) to be held next month.
Twelve short films will compete for the top award at the Festival on 2 and 3 May at Assam State Museum Auditorium, Guwahati.
Other sections include World Kaleidoscope, Indian Kaleidoscope, and North-East Shorts.
The World Kaleidoscope section will see screening of award winning short films from Cannes International Festival. Apart from that, seven award winning short films from Spain will also be screened in the World Kaleidoscope section, out of which Porque Hay Cosas Que Nunca Se Ol Vidan (Because There Are Things We Never forget) by award winning director Lucas Figueroa will open the festival.
Festival Director and National Award-winning film critic Utpal Borpujari said a major highlight of the festival will be a special screening of the highly-acclaimed Malayalam anthology film titled 'Kerala Cafe' directed by a team of ten directors - Lal Jose, Shaji Kailas, Anwar Rasheed, Shyamaprasad, B. Unnikrishnan, Revathy, Anjali Menon, M. Padmakumar, Shankar Ramakrishnan, and Uday Ananthan.
For the first time in the history of Malayalam cinema, this film was conceived by a team of 10 directors, 10 cinematographers, musicians, editors, art directors and almost all the top Malayalam film actors. The cast includes Mammootty, Suresh Gopi, Dileep, Jayasurya, Prithviraj, Sreenivasan, Siddique, Sreenath, Rahman, Thilakan, Jagathy Sreekumar, Salim Kumar, Anoop Menon, Navya Nair, Shwetha Menon, Jyothirmayi, Rima Kallingal, Nithya Menon and Dhanya Mary Varghese.
The festival is an initiative of Creovaent Productions in association with Shamiana, the acclaimed short film club from Mumbai.
The jury that will judge the films in competition will be headed by eminent filmmaker Shyamaprasad from Kerala (director of award-winning Malayalam box office hits like Agnisakshi, Ore Kadal and Elektra). The other jury members will be Assamese actor Adil Hussain, this year’s Aravindan Puraskaram winning director Nila Madhab Panda and internationally-acclaimed Manipuri filmmaker Haobam Paban Kumar.
Hussain is acting in Ang Lee’s ‘Life of Pi’, Sridhar Raghavan’s ‘Agent Vinod’ and several other important films in various languages, after having received acclaim in films like 'Gangor' by Italian director Italo Spinelli, 'For Real' by Sona Jain and 'Ishqiya' by Abhishek Choubey. Panda’s feature debut ‘I Am Kalam’ has won 11 international awards till now, and Kumar’s documentaries ‘AFSPA’ and ‘Mr India’ have earned global acclaim.
The competition films were selected from a large number of entries received from all over North-East India by a preview jury comprising noted theatre and film personality Nayan Prasad, eminent film editor Kaju, film critic Chandan Sharma and acclaimed director Bidyut Chakravarty.
The films in competition are: Savages (Tarunabh Dutta), Serendipity (Suraj Duwarah), Dwita (Dipankar Das), Windows 4:3 (Angshuman Barkakoty), I Am a Poet (Shashanka Das & Deep Choudhury), Lemon Brothers Fall (Utpal Choudhury), The Silent Darkness (Jhulan Krishna Mahanta), IF (Khanjan Kishore Nath), Being Jobless (Shrutismita Changkakoti), 19/87 (Wanphrang K Diengdoh & Dondor E Lyngdoh), Bond (Anubhav Mahanta) and The 4th Law of Motion (Deepkamal Gogoi)
The festival will have a special tribute to young filmmaker Anghsuman Borkotoky by screening his film “Doctor, Nurse and Patient”, while another film by him - Windows 4:3 - will be in competition.
The prizes that will be given away in the competition section are for the Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing and Best Cinematography. The winners will be awarded with Golden and Silver Rhino along with certificates.
"The GISFF is an important initiative to create a platform to discuss, disseminate and in future market short fiction films, a genre that is finding more and more popularity all over the world in recent times. Young Assamese film entrepreneur Prithish Chakraborty of Creovaent Productions has developed the concept of the festival and I am sure in the coming years it will emerge as an important and exciting event in the film festival calendar of India," Borpujari said.
