Calcutta film festival gets underway

From a poignant story of a semi-retarded boy's efforts to repair a village tube well to tragic tales of caste war victims of Bihar, 30 National Award winning films will be screened in Calcutta from September 20.

The three-day festival of documentaries and short films, to be inaugurated by noted filmmaker Tapan Sinha, will feature celluloid greats produced during the last four years by the Films Division.

"The festival showcases the potential of the world's biggest documentary film-producing unit, which has to its credit 188 international and 195 national awards," says FD Chief Producer Bankim Kapadia.

The longest film in the festival would be the Deepak Roy's 90-minute long documentary Dhanna, which won the Rajat Kamal for best film on social issues in 1998. The shortest would be the Ravi Jadhav's 2.3 minute long The Landscape that bagged the best animation film award this year.

Four films directed by renowned documentary filmmaker Joshy Joseph (Sentence of Silence, Sarang -- Symphony in Cacophony, Wearing the Face, And the Bamboo Blooms) would form part of the show, being jointly organised by Films Division and the West Bengal government film complex Nandan.

PTI