Screen + Sound + Stage
Text by Asad Ali
India’s first globally competitive film festival – the third edition of the International Film Festival of India, New Delhi, 1965 – had all the trappings of bureaucratic importance. It was the first major institutional push to expand the landscape of cinema in India. The President and the Vice-President, Indira Gandhi (then minister of Information & Broadcasting), the mayor of Delhi, and the chief ministers of Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra were all in attendance. And, as the festival wound up, the critic Edith Laurie, in a 1965 edition of Film Comment, wrote that “… after a frenetic month of sold-out houses… some people asked: Would there be another film festival? Others asked: Should there be? India must decide.”
Fifty-five years on, film lovers in the country face a…