Competition has returned to the International Film Festival of India after a break of nearly 10 years. But controversy and chaos have always been an integral part of the IFFI story, in one form or another. The manner in which the five Indian films in the competition section for Asian women directors have been selected has stirred a hornet's nest. Why, for instance, is Sagari Chhabra's Tatva , a 47-minute short feature, in, while Bombay-based Madhusree Dutta's Memories of Fear , a 57-minute documentary that welds together four parallel narratives about child-women of various age groups, not? According to the Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF), Chhabra, who lives and works in Delhi, formally applied for entry while Dutta did not. But Dutta's contention is that she, like so many others, wasn't even aware that she was supposed to seek entry. "My print was lying with the DFF because it is in the Indian Panorama and so I took it for granted that I was automatically in the running," says the Bombay-based Dutta. She did not receive a single line from the DFF informing her of the need to apply for entry.
Not one to give up without a fight, Dutta has got a whole lot of filmmakers, even Sai Paranjpye and Suhasini (whose films are incidentally, in competition), to put their signatures on a note protesting against the selection process. The note, signed by the likes of Saeed Mirza and M.S. Sathyu, has been duly sent to the festival director, Malti Sahai. It is too late, of course, for the situation to be rectified this time, but Dutta hopes that this "display of solidarity" by filmmakers will have the desired effect when films are selected for IFFI's next edition.
