Kolkata International Film Festival
(KIFF) has proved it yet again. Kolkata’s passion and love for cinema is still intact despite the COVID-19 scare. Almost every day viewers stand in queue to watch cinemas at different venues.
It was the similar emotion that also inspired
Prosenjit Chatterjee to visit Nandan at the inauguration of the exhibition to pay tribute to Pandit Ravi Shankar, Hemanta Mukhopadhyay, Bhanu Bandopadhyay,
Federico Fellini and Eric Rohmer.
“People of Kolkata are passionate about sports and cinema. Being a cinema person, I want to support a film festival. Instead of going completely digital, our chief minister has given her go-ahead for a physical edition of KIFF during the pandemic. She has also sanctioned the finances for organizing it. I am grateful to her for that,” Chatterjee shared with ETimes during an exclusive chat.
Prosenjit was also the KIFF chairperson before
Raj Chakraborty was appointed. “This festival is very important to me. I always love to watch films at Nandan. Raj is much younger than me and I felt I had to support him since he is trying to organize the festival even during the pandemic. When he told me the names of the legends whom KIFF is paying a centenary tribute to, I felt I had to be there to support this initiative. I wanted to do a festival of Bhanu Bandopadhyay’s films at Nandan,” he added.
The Tollywood superstar also insisted that the “magic of cinema” will never die. According to him, the visuals and techniques of cinema might change but movies will live forever. “I watched Satish Kaushik’s new film ‘
Kagaaz
’. This man, who once did ‘Mr India’, has directed a film during the pandemic with
Pankaj Tripathi that almost seems like a documentary. Even
Anubhav Sinha, who made ‘Ra.One’, is now doing different kinds of movies. I appreciate this change and feel this is a learning exercise for us,” he signed off.
Meanwhile, on the work front, Prosenjit has two films lined up – Kaushik Ganguly’s ‘Kaberi Antardhaan’ and
Indraadip Dasgupta’s ‘Asadoma Sadgamaya’.
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