Movie addicts will be able to get an overdose of films from today, November 20, 2023, till the next eight days as the 54th International Film Festival of India ball starts rolling in a grand opening ceremony at the Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Indoor Stadium on Goa's Taleigao Plateau.
The festival opens with the international premiere of Catching Dust, a film by award-winning British filmmaker Stuart Gatt, setting the pace for some engrossing cinema across four venues in Panjim where 270 films will be screened.
Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting Anurag Thakur will also felicitate the filmmakers and cast of the opening film at INOX complex, which is one of the four film-screening venues.
Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting Anurag Thakur will open the festival at Taleigao. He will also felicitate the filmmakers and cast of the opening film at INOX complex, which is one of the four film-screening venues.
The minister will also inaugurate the Film Bazaar on the sidelines of the festival. The Film Bazaar is South Asia’s largest global film market organised by the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) alongside IFFI every year, supporting and showcasing South Asian content and talent in filmmaking, production and distribution. It also facilitates the promotion of world cinema in the South Asian region.
The festival, this year, promises to be all-inclusive as elaborate arrangements have been made for specially-abled delegates to access venues and screenings with ease.
Embedded audio for the visually impaired and embedded sign language will also be made available. Besides this, the Indian Panorama Films dubbed in various languages will also be screened.
Meanwhile, the opening ceremony will showcase performances by Bollywood stars Madhuri Dixit and Shahid Kapoor.
Eminent personalities from the film industry, including Salman Khan, Vidya Balan, Ayushmann Khurrana, Catherine Zeta-ones, Anupam Kher, Vicky Kaushal, Siddharth Malhotra, Aditi Rao Hydari, A R Rahman, Amit Trivedi, among other celebrated actors, singers and filmmakers will attend the ceremony.
Eminent personalities from the film industry, including Salman Khan, Vidya Balan, Ayushmann Khurrana and Anupam Kher will be present.
Bollywood stars Shriya Saran, Nushratt Bharucha, Pankaj Tripathi, Shantanu Moitra, Shreya Ghoshal and Sukhwinder Singh will also perform.
The film festival, which will run till November 28, 2023, will close with The Featherweight, a 2023 American biographical sports drama film directed by Robert Kolodny.
This year, IFFI has received an overwhelming response with a total of 2926 entries from 105 countries, learnt to be three times more international submissions than last year.
Fifteen feature films (12 international and 3 Indian) will compete for the coveted Golden Peacock award this year.