Thiruvananthapuram: Former cinema minister K.B. Ganesh Kumar’s strategy of starving film societies of funds seems to have worked. The Federation of Film Societies of India (FFSI) has been forced to abandon the parallel Open Forum which it had started last year in rebellion against Ganesh’s despotic move to end the official Forum.
“The societies have been deprived of government grants since last year. As a result they are short of funds and the FFSI has run up huge debts after the conduct of Signs (a documentary fest) this year,” said film critic C.S. Venkiteswaran, who was part of the parallel forum. “Without money I don’t know how the organizers are going to conduct the parallel Open Forum,” he added.
Last year, the Open Forum was launched with as much defiance as possible. The shamiana was erected on a plot right next to the main IFFK venue. The organizers also roped in Adoor Gopalakrishnan to inaugurate the Forum. And it was named PG Pavilion after the Marxist ideologue P. Govinda Pillai. And the ‘PG Pavilion’ opened with a PG Memorial Lecture the day IFFK’s official ‘Discussion Forum’ was inaugurated.
When Adoor suggested that the new forum was a supportive and not a critical forum, the PG Pavilion organizers disagreed vehemently. “This should be seen as a rebel forum. The refusal to conduct an Open Forum at the IFFK this year was part of the state’s efforts to deny public spaces for the common man,” a participant said.
PG’s name was used for the pavilion to evoke the glory days of the ‘Open Forum’. PG’s debate on Marxism with Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Zanussi at the Open Forum in 1998 had made international headlines and gave the ‘Open Forum’ an ideological appeal.
The Kerala chapter of FFSI introduced Open Forum at the International Film Festival of India in Thiruvananthapuram in 1988. It became so popular that the concept was replicated elsewhere. Even in Goa, it is the FFSI that conducts the Open Forum.
