THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The 21st International Film festival of Kerala (IFFK) will kick off on December 9 with Navid Mahmoudi’s Afghan film Raftan (Parting). Migration and the suffering of refugees, which forms the undercurrent of ‘Raftan’, will be the leitmotif of the 21st IFFK. “The inaugural film will kindle memories of three-year-old Kurdish boy Alan Kurdi whose dead body was washed up on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea,” culture minister A.K. Balan told reporters here on Friday. The IFFK inaugural will confer the lifetime achievement on Czechoslovakian New Wave filmmaker Jirí Menzel.
As many as 184 films from 62 countries will be showcased at the IFFK in 490 screenings. There will nine sections: competition films, ‘curated’ sections, Indian Cinema Now, World Cinema, Malayalam Cinema Today, Country Focus (Kazhakhstan), Jury films, retrospectives and homages. The retrospectives are of British filmmaker Ken Loach and south Indian filmmaker K.S. Sethumadhavan. There will also be a special screening of Iranian auteur Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s ‘The Nights of Zayandeh-Rood’. The films will be shown in 11 theatres, with a total capacity of 9000.
Mr Balan said that already 11,000 delegates have paid the delegate fee. Delegate passes will be issued subject to a maximum of 13,000. The six-member jury will be headed by Arab filmmaker Michel Khleifi and will include Seema Biswas, Kazhakstan filmmaker Serik Aprymov, Iranian actress Baran Kosari, and Durban Film Festival programmer Pedro Pimenta. There will also be FIPRESCI and Netpac juries. The customary Aravindan Memorial lecture will be delivered by Ethiopian writer and director Haile Gerima.
