Photo Credits: Compiled by Ashley do Rosario with inputs from Manuel Vaz
In a little over a week, the next edition of the International Film
Festival of India will be underway, marking the 19th year of its
Goan avtaar. So, nearly two decades since Goa began hosting
it, has the festival today attained the promised stature of the one at
Cannes?
Obviously not it seems from the utterances of Union Minister of
State for Information and Broadcasting L Murugan who was in Goa
earlier this week to take stock of the preparations this year.
“IFFI will be held from November 20 to 28. This time we are focusing
on film bazaars and other things. National Film Development
Corporation (NFDC), government of India and Goa are organising IFFI
this time like Cannes film festival,” is what Murugan told the media
in Panaji.
Sounds familiar?
It certainly does for people like us who were in the thick of things in
the run-up to the festival hosted for the first time in Goa in 2004.
“Goa is very similar. We will make the IFFI in Goa as good as the
Cannes festival,” were the words of the late Manohar Parrikar, unarguably
the architect of bringing the festival to Goa then.
Parrikar even acted on his words. Soon after that first Goa edition
of 2004, he packed off a team of trusted lieutenants including IAS
officer Sanjit Rodrigues to a world tour including to France, to study
the Cannes template so it can be replicated in Goa. It is another
matter that before the team could return, Parrikar was no longer the
CM by mid-2005 and the grandiose plan of replicating Cannes in Goa
got dumped.
Meanwhile, the cameras at IFFI continued to roll on year after year
with no significant change either in quality or quantity and 20 years
later we are back to square one: a burning desire to replicate Cannes,
as per Murugan.
Meanwhile members of Tollywood, Mollywood, Sandalwood and
all the other South Indian ‘woods’ will continue grudgingly participate
in the IFFI hurling abuses at the organisers for transforming the Goa
avtaar of the festival all about Bollywood!
