Jagran Film Festival: Pre-Festival Screening of films to be showcased

The 9th Jagran Film Festival, that aims to connect great cinema with a nationwide audience, conducted a pre-festival screening of films from International and Indian short competition

As part of the pre-festival screening, Toma Leroux's Lili Within The Clouds, Rafael Camara's The Bridge, Emi Buchwald's Heimat, Marianne Blicher's Odd Job Man and Naomi van Niekerk's My Mum's Bonkers were screened as part of films from International shorts competition. Ruthy Pribar's The Caregiver, Vikas Chandra's Maya, Ajitpal Singh's Humming Bird and Reema Sengupta's Counterfeit Kunkoo were screened from films from the Indian Shorts competition.

The event was concluded by Mayank Shekhar, Festival Director, Jagran Film Festival who said, “This year at Jagran Film Festival, we bring to you films that are unique and films that are not in theatres. All of these films have been thoughtfully curated by us and a selection jury that has watched hundreds of movies before narrowing them down to the best. I give you a festival guarantee that you will not walk out of any movie, not having loved it. The movies we have this year will expand your horizons in terms of what a film can be.”

This year, JFF received more than 3500 submissions across genres from 116 countries. The curated program will showcase over 400 films. The competition segment will include International and Indian Features, Shorts, Indian Documentaries and Student Films. The non-competitive segment will include Indian Specials, a Retrospective, Tributes, India Showcase, World Showcase and Hot Shorts.

A new feature in JFF 2018 - Competition Category of Indian Documentary Features has been introduced which will be judged by a set panel led by director Sudhir Mishra. Participation includes internationally acclaimed documentaries such as Vinay Shukla and Khushboo Ranka's An Insignificant Man, Vaishali Sinha's Ask The Sexpert, Ishwar Srikumar's Up Down; Sideways, Onir's Raising The Bar and Kamal Swaroop's Pushkar Puran.

The India Features Competition includes award-winning films in various languages, like Lijo Jose Pellissery's Ee. Ma. Yau (Malayalam), Rima Das’ Village Rockstars (Assamese), Abhay Simha's Paddayi (Tulu), Pushpendra Sing's Ashwatthama (Brijbhasha), and Zakaria Edayur's Sudani From Nigeria.

The Shorts Program will include a competition category with Indian and international shorts and a non-competition category called Hot Shorts.

India Shorts Competition segment will feature shorts from across the country such as: Hesh Sarmalkar's Clash of Morality, a documentary short, Bismaar Ghar (Gujarati) directed by Shreyas Dashrathe, Siddharth Chauhan's Paashi (Pahadi, Hindi), Sudha Padmaja's Eye Test (Malayalam), Saptarshi Bhattacharya's Adrift (Bengali), Ruthy Pribar&'s The Caregiver and Paulomi Ghosh (Hindi).

International Shorts Competition features applauded narratives, documentaries and animation shorts from 2017-18, like: Johanna Gribaudo and Matias Lebrero's Chachura (Argentina), On The Waitlist (Taiwan) directed by Hung Yi Wu, Toma Leroux's Lilly Within the Clouds (France) and an animation short My Mum's Bonkers, directed by Naomi Van Niekerk.

The non-competitive shorts segment Hot Shorts features some of the best shorts in recent years including Payal Kapadia's award-winning Afternoon Clouds, (Cinefondation, Cannes Film Festival 2017), Amar Kaushik's Aaba (Berlinale 2017) and Aditya Kergaonkar's Soundproof starring Soha Ali Khan.

The Country Partner will showcase some of the best films from Iran, along with Argentina being the Country Focus. There will also be an Achievers Segment featuring best of Indian biopics.

The India Showcase category films include Turup by Ektara Collective, Himjyoti Talukdar's Calendar (Assamese), Neelam R Singh's Tarpan – The Salvation, Arnab K Middya's Andarkahini (Bengali), Chirag Desgiri's No Mind and Onir's Kuch Bheege Alfaaz.

The International Competition category will feature films such as Bekir Bulbul's My Short Words (Turkish), Agbo Kelly's Hidden (Nigeria), Kioumars Samadi Tari's The Stunt Man (Persian), Gary J Hewitt's Creek (United Kingdom) and Rizgar Husen's Sacrifice (Kurdish).

World Showcase category will feature films like Amer Salmeen Al Murry's Fan Of Amoory (Arabic), Sean Brown's Strictly Professional (United States) and Professor Thompson directed by Andrei Sporea and Edgardo Borrayes.

The 2018 edition of the Jagran Film Festival that aimed to connect with 18 cities, commenced in Delhi and toured to other Indian cities like Kanpur, Lucknow, Allahabad, Varanasi, Patna, Dehradun, Ranchi, Jamshedpur, Bhopal, Indore, Gorakhpur, Agra, Ludhiana, Hissar, Meerut and Raipur, before concluding in Mumbai in September.

Jagran Film Festival is a Dainik Jagran initiative.

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