Hyderabad to host 19th Children's Film Festival

Hyderabad, Oct 17 (INN): Children's Film Society, India and Government of Telangana will be hosting 19th International Children's Film Festival, India also known as Golden Elephant in Hyderabad starting 14th November.

19th ICFFI, a week-long festival has once again many innovations and firsts to its credit like previous editions. This edition of 19th ICFFI, a special section on showcasing Asian Films has been created that is known as Asian Panorama. Hotel Venue for the festival has been finalised as Hotel Park, Hyderabad.

Dr. Shravan Kumar, Festival Director, 19th ICFFI, Golden Elephant said, 'Festival will open on the Children's day at SHILPARAMAM, the arts, crafts & cultural village at Hyderabad and will have screenings of children's movies in multiple theatres across Hyderabad. In one of the many firsts, we have received international entries for our Little Directors concept that was introduced as an innovation in the previous edition of ICFFI.'

19th ICFFI aims to involve the Government, Bureaucracy, Film fraternity, Celebrities and other eminent people of Media and Arts from India and abroad towards enhancing the children's participation towards film making and thereby exploiting their creative faculties to the fullest in nation-building. Honourable prime Ministers' favourite programme DIGITAL INDIA, will also be the theme for this Festival and a series of events have been planned for the same.

Mukesh Khanna, Chairman, Children's Film Society India said, 'I am sending my best wishes to the participating Children in 19th ICFFI. They are the future of our nation and such events allow them to receive exposure to the global culture.'

In the 19th edition of ICFFI, many International Award winning films have been received by CFSI such as Maya the Bee (Feature Film) from Germany, Celestial Camel (Feature Film) from Russia, Pim&Pom, The Big Adventure (Feature Film) from Netherlands, Birds of Passage (Feature Film) from Belgium, My Skinny Sister (feature film) from Sweden, Rainbow (Feature Film) from India and many more.

'We have received participation from 80 countries and as an additional step towards enhancing the international participation in the festival we also explored contacting many embassies for their participation in the 19th Edition of ICFFI. Many of these embassies like Sweden, Egypt, Mexico, Republic Of Armenia, Afghanistan and Switzerland etc. responded to our request and submitted 45 film entries for the festival, added Dr. Shravan Kumar, Festival Director, 19th ICFFI, Golden Elephant.

This edition of ICFFI has received a record entries of 1204 films from 80 countries, the largest ever in any edition of ICFFI. There were 894 entries from 75 countries in the 18th edition of ICFFI organised in the year 2013 while the previous edition I.e. 17th ICFFI saw participation from 87 countries with 748 films. This growing number of entries reflects the increasing popularity and recognition of the festival.

It must be noted that recently, CFSI was represented in Berlin Film Festival for exploring the possibility of marketing Indian children films abroad by participating in the European Film Market (EFM). Also, it was Berlin Film Festival where Gattu was given a Special Mention by International Jury at Generation Berlinale 2012.

'Gattu' was also the first commercially released film of CFSI. While, CFSI's film 'Pappu Ki Pugdandi' was also officially selected for the Toronto International Film Festival Kids 2015 edition that was organised from 7th to 19th April, 2015 in Toronto, Canada.

CFSI has been making films for Indian market since its inception and this would be a collective effort to reach market internationally and make much better cinema which would be entertaining as well as educative.

CFSI was setup in 1955 and since then it has produced, exhibited and distributed over 250 films for children including feature films, short films, animations, television episodes and documentaries.