Spotlight on India at Locarno film fest

Panaji, Dec 1 (IANS) After China and Central Asia, Indian filmmakers will get an opportunity to showcase their creativity at the Locarno Film Festival next year.

Speaking to reporters in Panaji on the sidelines of the 41st International Film Festival of India (IFFI), the artistic director of the Locarno fest, Olivier Pere, said that India will feature at the 'Open Doors' section of the event in 2011.

'We chose India because Indian cinema needs to come back to the international film market. We have to convince a lot of people that Bollywood is not the only Indian cinema and that there is so much more cinema which focuses on social, traditional and modern subjects,' Pere said.

'We want to help promising young filmmakers find a market in Locarno, which attracts members of the film trade from all across the world,' he said.

'Everybody knows that India outpaces the world in film production, releasing around 1,300 films every year,' Pere said.

'But these figures can be misleading. The strength of commercial production, concentrated in the four main linguistic regions should not make us lose sight of the many talented filmmakers across the country, who are finding it very hard to express themselves through independent circuits. The next edition of Open Doors will give voice to those artists,' Pere said.

He also said that China and Central Asian countries like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan were already a part of the Open Doors segment, which is supported by the Swiss foreign ministry's agency for development and co-operation (SDC) and its main objective is to assist the directors and producers of the selected projects to find co-production partners, particularly in Europe.