49th international film festival begins today

Panaji: The 49th edition of the International Film Festival of India will open tomorrow with the gala opening ceremony that will showcase the theme of New India through a variety of genres of cinema. This would entail a 90-minute power-packed programme incorporating elements and narratives of the rich and diverse kaleidoscope of the Indian film heritage and industry.

The colourful opening ceremony will showcase the themes of history, action and romance. Audi-ences will get to watch an array of on-stage scintillating performances by mainstream Bollywood artists — with Sonu Sood doing an action packed set, Shilpa Rao doing a romantic bit and dancers opening the ceremony with a mesmerising act.

The ceremony will be graced by Governor of Goa, Smt. Mridula Sinha; Union minister of state for information and broa-dcasting, Col. Rajyavardh-an Rathore; PWD minister Shri Sudin Madhav Dhav-alikar; and chairperson, Film Certification Appell-ate Tribunal, Prasoon Joshi.

Apart from this, a host of celebrities will walk the red carpet, giving added colour to the ceremony. Amongst the big personalities, we will have Akshay Kumar, Karan Johar, Juli-en Landais, Hrishita Bha-tt, Madhur Bhandarkar, Subhash Ghai, Arijit Sin-gh, Ramesh Sippy and Chin Han.

The ceremony is being held at the Shyama Pras-ad Mukherjee Indoor Sta-dium, Goa, from 4.30 pm onwards. The opening ceremony will go live on DD National at 4.30pm, and will also be streamed LIVE on the YouTube cha-nnel of PIB youtube.com-/pibindia.

The show will witness the launch of the Film Facilitation Office, an initiative by the ministry of information and broadcasting.

Glimpses of the festival opening film The Aspern Papers, which tells a story of obsession, grandeur lost and dreams of Byron-ic adventureswill be scree-ned for the audience and the Director of the Film, Julien Landaiswill addre-ss the audience on the occasion.

26 feature and 21 non – feature Indian films are selected by the Indian Panorama Jury to be screened as part of this section out of the hundreds of entries sent by filmmakers from various parts of the country. The feature film jury selected the film OLU directed by Shaji N. Karun as the ope-ning feature film of Indi-an Panorama 2018. The Non-Feature film Jury selected the film Kharvas directed by Aditya Suhas Jambhale as the Opening non-feature film of Indian Panorama 2018.

This edition of the festival will showcase 212 films from over 68 countries which reflects diversity of taste. The competition will feature 15 films out of which 3 are Indian.