Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Wednesday, May 11, 2005 |
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Staff Reporter
NEW DELHI: It will be a crucial session for the committee constituted by the Union Ministry for Information and Broadcasting to frame guidelines for film festivals when it meets here in the Capital this Tuesday. With a decision pending on whether the controversial censor certificate should be made compulsory for a film festival, documentary film-makers believe it will finally make the Government's stand on freedom of expression clear. The meeting will also decide the fate of the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) due next year. The draft agenda of the MIFF organising committee proposes to amend the rules of the festival to make a censor certificate for all Indian entries compulsory. And while the amendment has not been passed as yet, documentary filmmakers across the country are up in arms. "Films are like any other art form. We believe that we should need to reach out to as many people and don't need to be censored. The organisers of MIFF have not finalised anything as yet and we are awaiting the decision of the committee that meets tomorrow. But the whole idea of having a censor certificate for a festival is wrong,'' said filmmaker Chandita Mukerjee. Ready for battle, filmmakers under the banner of Films for Freedom have shot off a letter to the Union Minister of Information and Broadcasting, Jaipal Reddy. However, this is not first time that MIFF has run into problems because of the censor certificate. The festival faced similar flak when it was held in 2004 and filmmakers decided to boycott it and hosted a parallel festival titled VIKALP. "At the time it was widely felt that the primary motive of the National Democratic Alliance (led by the BJP) was to keep out of MIFF a whole range of films critical of the Government. Ironically, it was the attempts to thwart expression by the previous regime that was one of the key issues against which the present UPA was mandated,'' the letter stated.
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