The International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK 2022) will showcase the cinematic expertise of 86 filmmakers, predominantly from the European and Asian continents. Films from over 60 countries have made it to the list.
The popular World Cinema category at IFFK will feature many award-winning films, including the Oscar-nominated ‘Drive My Car’. The Cannes Film Festival winners ‘Ripples of Life’, ‘Prayers For The Stolen’ and Nadav Lapid’s ‘Ahed’s Knee’; the Venice Film Festival winner, ‘Sun Children’; and ‘Brighton 4th’, which has won various awards including the coveted Best Film title at the Asian World Film Festival t will be screened in this category.
The two-time Oscar winner Asghar Farhadi’s ‘A Hero’, a film which is an unusual combination of drama, moral fable and a thriller; Radu Jude’s ‘Bad Luck Banging’ and Carlos Saura’s musical drama, ‘The King of All the World’, are among the celebrated movies that will be screened under this category. From France comes ‘A Tale of Love and Desire’, which revolves around a young man who falls for his classmate and his struggles to reconcile his physical urges with his cultural values.
An interesting aspect this year is the participation of 23 women filmmakers in this category. Among them, Maria Schrader’s film ‘I’m Your Man’ explores various facets of what it means to be a human in the modern age. Two Indian films- Natesh Hegde’s debut film ‘Pedro and Two Friends’ by Prasun Chatterjee- have also made it to this prestigious category.
The films to be screened in the World Cinema category bespeak a global trend of social concern among filmmakers. Blerta Basholli’s Albanian-language drama ‘Hive’, which is about a widow’s fight against a patriarchal system; Manolo Nieto’s Spanish drama ‘The Employer and the Employee’, which discusses the convoluted relationship of people with happiness, freedom and work; Bolat Kalymbetov’s ‘Mukagali’, a biopic of the Kazakh poet who became the symbol of the nation’s struggle for independence; and Péter Kerekes’ ‘107 Mothers’, which depicts real-life stories of motherhood in Ukraine across society, are some of the acclaimed movies that will be screened under this category.