Manoj Bajpayee, Rajkummar hail reach of film fests

National Award winning actors Manoj Bajpayee and Rajkummar Rao on Sunday hailed the reach of film festivals, saying that the platform is a "fantabulous concept of exposing cinema and generating audience across India".

On the third day of the 7th Jagran Film Festival (JFF), the actors were at the Siri Fort auditorium for the screening of their film "Aligarh".

"It's a fantabulous concept of exposing cinema and generating audience across India. JFF provides such movies an opportunity to reach a larger audience, who can't get to watch them at the cinema. I have been associated with JFF in the past as well and visited Indore for the festival last year," Manoj said in a statement.

"The journey of 'Aligarh' has been a great one and it's going places. We are receiving amazing response from the audience and it's very satisfactory," he added.

Talking about JFF, Rajkummar said: "I have been associated with the festival for long. My movies, including 'Shahid' and others were screened here previously and I'm glad to be here with 'Aligarh' being screened at the fest."

"Aligarh", a Hansal Mehta directorial, is based on the real life incident of Srinivas Ramchandra Siras, an academician at the Aligarh Muslim University who was suspended from his job because of his sexual orientation. The movie has been critically acclaimed.

On Sunday, the festival's schedule began with Mira Nair's "Monsoon Wedding" under retrospective category.

The other films that were screened at different auditoriums here included the likes of Marathi film "Namrata" by Mahesh Manjrekar, Tanuja Chandra's "Silvat", Romanian film "Discordia", Marathi film "Sairat", and Meghna Gulzar's "Talvar".

Short films like "3 Colours" (Persian), "One Night Bang" (Japanese), "Winter's Journey" (German), and "Horror Vacui" (Spanish) were also showcased.