Kolkata Film Festival: Day 3 news

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Three directors stole the show today. Theo Angelopoulus, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Sam Wood. Angelopoulus marvelled us with his The suspended step of the stork, a film based on the refugees in a border town of Greece. The script was an original idea of the director and it deals with a film-maker's travails to find out a famous politician who had taken refuge in the camps. This is surely one of the best films to be shown at the festival and the viewers are now very keen to see the rest of his films.

Last year, there was a package of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's films. Those who had seen Climates had specially come to watch the Palm D'or winner at Cannes 2007 Three Monkeys. And this could be seen by the huge crowd that had turned up to watch the film at Rabindra Sadan, where a huge fight had broken up as there were no seats and the authorities did not allow the people to enter. While many sat on the floor, some people like me had to watch the entire film standing as there was no place on the floor also. We had to stand at the gates to watch the film.

A superb screenplay and cinematography of the highest order were the main components of the film which evoked a huge round of applause from the viewers once the film was over. There were some breath-taking long shots which got a new dimension because of the beautiful filming of the skies. Shot on a sepia-tinted film, the film's editing was done with near perfection as the length of the shots were appropriate, whether it was capturing the frustration of the son, mother or father. It is surely one of the films that every budding film-maker would want to see.

Sam Wood's A Night at the Opera had been selected for the festival as it is considered to be one of the films which inspired Satyajit Ray. Hence it has been kept under the category Remembering Ray in the festival schedule. Under this category, there are Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity and Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise. Sam Wood's film surprisingly had many takers though it had already been shown at previous year's festivals in Kolkata.

One of the major attractions for many movie lovers is the Film Market. Here 16 stalls have been put up by production and distribution companies as well as companies which buy copyrights of films. Stalls have been put up by NFDC, Films Division, Venkatesh Films, NDTV Luminere and Moser Baer. S. Pradhan, junior manager, NFDC, said their main aim was to sell the rights of their films to national as well as international buyers. The purpose behind setting up a stall at KFF, according to Mr Sumoy Mukherjee of Films Division, was to sell the documentaries made by them since 1948. There was also Channel-B entertainment whose main task is to purchase copyrights of the films that are shown in the movie theatres. Sumit Agarwal, a junior manager of the company, said they buy the copyrights and then market the films by making VCDs and DVDs and also giving it to different TV channels.  Venkatesh films had set up their stall to display the new digital projection system that had been developed by Real Image, a Chennai-based company.