Like several international film festivals this year, the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA), was unable to take place due to the COVID-19 pandemic, pushing it to find innovative ways to connect with its audience. The festival is organising a virtual showcase, across 17 days, presenting 125 films from the last 17 editions of the festival, including feature films, documentaries and shorts.
The virtual showcase titled, IFFLA Over the Years: 17 days celebrating 17 years of Indian cinema , will take place from June 19 to July 5, but the list of films are now available on their website. The curated films have been categorised into 12 themes, such as, ‘Humor Me Now’, which contains comedies like the late Manish Acharya’s Loins of Punjab and ‘Grit and Thrills’ section, which has dramas like Anurag Kashyap's seminal work, Gangs of Wasseypur , and Vikramaditya Motwane’s Trapped . Other films across categories include Karishma Dev Dube’s Devi ( Goddess ), starring Priyanka Bose; Rima Das’ Village Rockstars , which was India’s Oscar entry for 2019; Shubhashish Bhutiani's Oscar-shortlisted short film Kush ; Lena Khan’s The Tiger Hunter and Ruthy Pribar’s The Caregiver; Richie Mehta's India In A Day , Shonali Bose's Amu , Devashish Makhija's Taandav , Tanuj Chopra’s Pia , and Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya’s The Hour of Lynching.
“This sort of an event is usually organised during a landmark year, like completion of 20 years, but we wanted to do it in these extraordinary times, since we were unable to hold IFFLA in April, and we didn’t want to take our 2020 line-up online,” says Christina Marouda, IFFLA’s founder. The 2020 line-up, which includes some world premieres, will be moved to 2021 and will take place offline.
Marouda informs that most films in the programming will be available for free on platforms such as Youtube and Vimeo. “We have asked the filmmakers to lift their passwords for 17 days,” she shares. But some films in the list would be playing on streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, which can only be accessed by members of these platforms.
The list of films also includes over 70 short films like Neha RT's satire The Shaila(s) and Jennifer Rosen's Laksh , making their online premiere with this virtual showcase.
The films are accessible via www.indianfilmfestival.org
