Archive for the 'Film festivals' Category

Bring Your Own Film Festival (BYOFF) in Puri (Feb 21-25 2008)

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Following is from http://www.byofilmfestival.com/index.htm:

Bring Your Own Film Festival (BYOFF) is an annual event held during February every year on Puri beach. To call it just a film festival is to limit its unique magical quality. It’s a festival without hierarchy, competition, juries and awards where not only filmmakers but also artists from other fields like music, theatre, painting, sculpture, dance, literature and photography are encouraged to participate and show their work.

In short, BYOFF can be best described as an informal and intimate gathering of artists with films in the backdrop where screenings go on early into the morning hours- first, inside makeshift tents and then in the open air after sun down.

For filmmakers, it has been an alternative platform ever since its first edition in the year 2004. The idea is to have a festival away from the oppressive atmosphere of bureaucratic control of big cities and where just about anybody – with or without films – could participate. The participants of BYOFF themselves are the volunteers and the organizers of its future editions. And the mood of the festival is that of a no holds barred carnival where the sea and its sand provide the right ambience to lift the spirits of every one present. Yeah, for five days and five nights.

Asian and African films in the Bhubaneswar film festival

Bhubaneswar- Cuttack- Puri, Film festivals, Khordha 1 Comment »

Following is an excerpt from a news report in the Statesman.

The Film Society of Bhubaneswar (FSB) is organising Airtel Bhubaneswar Film Festival’07 (BFF’07), which will begin from tomorrow. The five-day event will bring together a selection of contemporary and critically acclaimed films, which would offer meaningful and entertaining exposure to social issues, cultural conventions and artistic excellence from all over the world. In total, 16 highly acclaimed feature films and six documentary  films will be screened.

The most important feature of this film festival is the showcasing of contemporary African and Asian films, whose style and aesthetics have been critically appreciated in various echelons. In the African category, movies from South Africa, West Africa, Angola, Senegal and Morocco would be exhibited. They include films of award winning film-makers like Maria Joa Ganga, Ousmane Sembene, Nabil Ayouch, Abderrahmane Sissako, and Gavin Wood.

In the Asian category, films of Hirokazu Koreeda, Tsai Ming-liang, Bahman Farmanara and Nir Bergman would be screened. Apart from these, path-breaking classics of four great directors-Ugetsu Monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi), Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman), Mouchette (Robert Bresson) and Titas-Ekti Nadir Naam (Ritwik Ghatak) would be shown. Himanshu Khatua’s Sunya Swarupa, in Oriya would also be screened at the event.