Film festival fever ends
It was ‘the end’ to the serious looking kurtaclad men and matter-of-fact women glancing through festival booklets at the corridors of Savitha, Saritha, Sangeetha and Sridhar theatres.
The scenes at the cinemas, which were gripped by Kochi International Film Festival (KIFF) fever for the past five days, changed all of a sudden on Friday.
A horde of youngsters was seen thronging the cinema halls waiting patiently in long queues just to watch their favourite stars donning the big screens again.
With the release of main frame commercial flicks like Mohanlal- starrer ‘Karmayodha’, Mammootty-starrer ‘Bavuttiyude Namathil’, youth sensation Asif Ali’s and Unni Mukundan’s ‘I Love Me’ and Aashiq Abu’s ‘Da Thadiya’, the serious film lovers had to be satisfied with watching international movies from Children’s Park Theatre.
On the sixth day of the film festival the screening began at Children’s Park Theatre with a documentary titled ‘Kalifornia’ directed by Laura Mahlberg.
The theatre with a seating capacity of around 120 to 150 wore a deserted look with the poor participation from delegates.
Thus the shifting of the venue and restraining the screenings to a single venue acted as a setback to the smooth running.
However, the festival organisers had anticipated this situation much earlier and they had included more number of documentaries.
The sixth day saw a slew of culturally-oriented Malayalam docu-fiction like ‘Pacha’ by P K Sunilnath that zoomed in on the artistic journey of Kathakali artiste Kalamandalam Balasubramanian, ‘Varayudey Kulapathi’ by Binuraj and the documentary titled ‘Kaladharante Yathrakal’ that revolved around the life of artist Namboodiri and Kaladharan Master respectively.
Besides two German films were also screened.
‘Der Albaner- Sqiptari’ by Johannes Naber shed light on the German culture and discussed illegal immigration.
The other one to be screened was ‘Along Come Tourists’ by Robert Thalheim which was premiered in the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated as Best Picture at the 2008 German Film Awards, where lead actor Alexander Fehling won the German Film Promotion Award for his performance