New Delhi: The I-View World Film Festival is set to be the home of Oscars-bound features and artistes from all over the world as it kicks off from Thursday. Over 50 movies, including shorts films, documentaries and features, from South Asia, Canada, Britain, Italy, Sweden, Netherlands, Argentina, Australia, Turkey, Syria, Iran and Thailand will be screened during the festival, which will run from December 10 to 20 at the DLF CyberHub in Gurgaon.
Organised by Engendered, a trans-national arts and human rights organisation, the festival will commence with the screening of acclaimed filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s upcoming feature “Funny Boy”, which was recently announced as Canada’s official entry for best international film category at the 93rd Academy Awards. Mehta, best known for Elements trilogy, will later take part in a panel discussion about the film, which is based on Sri Lankan author Shyam Selvadurai’sbook by the same title.
Set in Sri Lanka during the 1970s and 1980s, the film explores the sexual awakening of its young protagonist Arjie (Arush Nand/Brandon Ingram) from a young boy, deemed funny by disapproving family, to a teenager enamoured by a male classmate. As political tensions escalate to a boiling point between the minority Tamils and the majority Sinhalese, the young boy comes of age in a society and family that doesn’t embrace difference outside of societal norms.
The festival’s socially-distance red carpet will be attended by Deepa Mehta, David Hamilton, Dilip Mehta, Divya Dutta, Swara Bhaskar, Faraz Ansari, Onir, Vivek Gomber, Tillotama Shome, Sayani Gupta, Shiladitya Bora, Tushar Tyagi and Dipannita Sharma. Nathan Grossman’scritically-acclaimed documentary,”I am Greta”, about teen climate activist Greta Thunberg, will be the centrepiece presentation at the festival.
The documentary chronicles Greta Thunberg’s School Strike for the Climate’ every Friday outside the Swedish parliament to a global movement over the years. Pakistani filmmaker Sarmad Khoosat’sfamily drama”Zindagi Tamasha”, which is set to represent the country at the Oscars, will close the festival.
Some of the other films that are a part of the line up include “Sir”, “Sheer Quorma”, “Aamis”, “Kastoori”, “Darker Than Midnight”, “Aani Maani”, “If You Dare Desire” and “Bittersweet”, among others. Director Richie Mehta and actor Shefali Shah of “Delhi Crime” fame will take part in the session on “Archetypes of Justice”. The show recently won the International Emmy award for best drama series.
“The one thing that these extraordinary times have brought is a sense of shared crisis across humanity, and while these times are challenging, there are all kinds of new possibilities that have emerged,”Myna Mukherjee, founder and director of Engendered, said in a statement. “We are able to reach out across the globe through these films, which are the perfect gateway to open up universal conversations around identity/marginalities, gender/sexuality, climate change/justice, class/caste and oppression/migration in contemporary culture. cinematic lens, we aim to create global awareness of issues that become heightened in the midst of a global pandemic,” she added.
The organisers also announced that starting with the 2020 edition, the film gala will merge with theNYC South Asian Film Festival(NYC SAFF) to alternate its human rights programming between New Delhi and New York City every other year. “We have a decade-long, symbiotic, dynamic relationship with Engendered and we are joining forces to increase our global reach by curating world-class content that will question the representation of ‘other’ and help find their place in our politically and socially-divisive cultures, all in an effort to bring us closer together as global citizens,” saidJitin Hingorani, founder and festival director of NYC SAFF.
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