BHARATI PAWASKAR
Organised in various cities in India and every alternate year in New Delhi, it used to be a fortnight-long event with added one-week press shows prior to the festival and all of this occupying three weeks in January unlike today when the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) has been reduced to mere eight-day event in Goa.
Film critic, journalist, writer and Fipresci Rekha Deshpande recalls the good old days of film festivals in India. Deshpande, who is in Goa for the 50th IFFI, has been an eyewitness to several film festivals in India and abroad. Speaking to TGLife in an exclusive one-to-one chat, Deshpande points out that, earlier, film festivals were organized by the Directorate of Film Festivals, under the ministry of Information and Broadcasting, government of India. Those were the days when film industry in South used to take keen interest in organizing the film festivals and help the directorate.
“Film Festival is not about Bollywood film stars as the people in Goa normally think. I have observed it for the past 15 years. Film festivals are platforms where you get the opportunity to watch the best of world cinema and also to interact with film fraternity of the world. IFFI-Goa is still in its infancy. It will take time to come to the world standard,” feels Deshpande.
What is it that Deshpande finds peculiar in IFFI-Goa? Overlooking the fact that Goa did not have any film culture, IFFI was brought to Goa in 2004 by the then chief minister, late Manohar Parrikar, and later was even offered a permanent venue in the state. Having witnessed this journey,
Deshpande who has attended film festivals in Berlin, Rotterdam, Cannes, Karlovy Vary and Dhaka, besides serving as a Frepresci jury at Karlovy Vary (2010) and Dhaka (2019) feels that lot has to change to bring IFFI-Goa to world standard.
Speaking of her own career in film journalism with magazines ‘Madhuri’ in the early 1970s, she remembers writing extensively for ‘Dharmayug’. Her interest in film journalism led her to take a course in Cinema from the St Xaviers’ Institute of Mass Communication in Mumbai in 1981. She began reviewing films soon after. Later she worked in ‘Jansatta’, ‘Screen’ and ‘Loksatta’ (of the Indian Express Group) till her retirement in 2010.
Deshpande has been attending IFFI since 1984, though the first film festival she covered was the 1975 Filmostava in Mumbai. The budding journalist in her was mentored by veterans like B K Karanjia and Arvind Kumar. She was lucky to have Arvind Kumar, the first editor of ‘Madhuri’ who strongly promoted parallel cinema movement in the 1970s and 1980s. “That influence made great impact on my writing,” says Deshpande who also penned scripts for serials - Savalya and Anandi Gopal, for Doordarshan.
After spending almost 50 years in film journalism and having interviewed faces and names from the black and white era like Devika Rani, Ashok Kumar, Talat Mehamood, Kamal Amrohi, Naushad, K Vaikunth, Sohrab Modi, Nalini Jaiwant, today, Deshpande’s views hold value. Deshpande is hopeful that despite the lapses, IFFI-Goa would achieve glory and dignity. Reasoning out for the shortcomings, she says, “There used to be only one film festival organized by the government of India. From 1990 onwards there has been various film festivals and people got opportunities to attend these. This has inversely reflected the presence of delegates in Goa, which is but natural. IFFI-Goa has a competition in the country with other film festivals and if Goa has to stand out, the performance has to be upgraded. As Goa is now the face and host of the international film festival in India, it is the need of the hour to appear in a new avatar.”
