First look: Mumbai Film Festival, 2016

At a press conference in the recently reopened Rang Mandir auditorium in Bandra, the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival team laid out their plans. The 18th edition of the annual festival begins on 20 October and concludes on 27 October. A panel that included Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee, Vishal Bhardwaj, Vikramaditya Motwane and Karan Johar took turns to announce the details of the latest edition.

The broad categories remain the same: India Gold and International Competition (competitive), World Cinema and India Story (non-competitive), Dimensions Mumbai (short fiction and documentary), Half-Ticket (children-centric cinema), Restored Classics and the experimental film section. Two new awards have been instituted: one for the best film addressing gender equality, and another for the best Indian female director.

The World Cinema section is, as always, where the heavy cinephile action is to be found. This time, the titles include Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or-winner I, Daniel Blake, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius, Mohamed Diab’s Clash, Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, Pablo Larrain’s Neruda, Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman, Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon, Lav Diaz’s The Women Who Left and Benedict Andrews’ Una. While this is a solid selection, it’s a little disappointing to note that Moonlight, It’s Only the End of the World, The Childhood of a Leader, Fire At Sea, The Birth of a Nation, La La Land, Voyage of Time and American Honey are missing from the line-up.

Like Aligarh did last year, the festival will open with an Indian film: Konkona Sensharma’s intriguing-looking A Death in the Gunj. Other selections in the Indian Gold category include Sudhanshu Saria’s Loev, Alankrita Shrivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha, Amit Madheshiya and Shirley Abraham’s The Cinema Travelers and Rohit Mittal’s Autohead. Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla’s An Insignificant Man, fresh from the Toronto International Film Festival, is in the India Story section.

If you’re a world cinema buff, this edition should allow for at least a glimpse of Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke (Platform, A Touch of Sin), who is being given the lifetime achievement award, and Portuguese film-maker Miguel Gomes (Tabu, Arabian Nights), who is heading the international competition jury. Sai Paranjpye, director of Katha and Chashme Buddoor, will be given a much-deserved lifetime achievement award. The next few weeks should hopefully see a few films added to various sections, and the announcement of a lecture or masterclass. If they can get someone half as entertaining as Christopher Doyle was last year, there’ll be crowds lining up.

See the entire line-up here.