Professionals should select the best films for IFFI: Adoor
Posted online: Dec 05, 2008 at 1429 hrs

: Noted filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishan stressed the need for professionals with ability and skills to chose the best of cinema to be a part of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI).
“Times are changing and one has to reach out to filmmakers and distributors all over the world to select the films. They will not come to you automatically because you are organising a festival for 39 years,” Adoor told reporters in Goa at the festival.

He said festivals world over have top film historians and critics associated with organisation and selection of films and that an international film festival is determined by the quality of films screened and not by organising it on a beach. “We have to apply our minds in this context,” he said. However, the filmmaker said he was very impressed by the good projection quality of INOX, where his latest film Oru Pennum Randaanum (A Climate for Crime) was screened. Like his last film Four Women, A Climate for Crime is also an adaptation of the literary works of Thakazhi Shiv Shankara Pillai. The project to make films on Pillai’s stories came about when Doordarshan wanted to compile works of writers in different languages who have produced classic literature.

“Pillai has more than 400 short stories to his credit. I chose eight stories and decided to make two films. If Four Women was about emotions of women set in different backdrops, my new film is linked by crimes in the background of the Second World War. India was not directly involved but since it was a colony of Britain, there were ill-effects of the war,” he said.
_ PTI