Adoor Gopalakrishnan is an Indian film director, script writer, and producer and is regarded as one of the most notable and renowned filmmakers in India. With the release of his first feature film Swayamvaram (1972), Gopalakrishnan pioneered the new wave in Malayalam cinema during the 1970s. In a career spanning over five decades, Gopalakrishnan has made only 12 feature films to date. His films are made in the Malayalam language and often depict the society and culture of his native state Kerala. Nearly all of his films premiered at Venice, Cannes and Toronto International Film Festival. Along with Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, Gopalakrishnan is one of the most recognized Indian film directors in world cinema.
The Cairo International Film Festival is an annual internationally accredited film festival held in Cairo Opera House. It was established in 1976 and has taken place every year since its inception, except for 2011 and 2013, when it was cancelled due to budget limitations and political instability. It is the only international competitive feature film festival recognized by the FIAPF in the Arab world and Africa, as well as the oldest in this category.
The International Film Festival of Kerala is a film festival held annually in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital city of Kerala, India. This film festival started in 1996 and is hosted by the Kerala State Chalachitra Academy on behalf of Department of Cultural Affairs, Government of Kerala. The festival is held in November or December every year and is acknowledged as one of the leading cultural events in India.
Diptendu Pramanick was a Bengali film personality from Calcutta. He was the founder secretary of the Eastern India Motion Pictures Association in Calcutta, India - a fraternity of film personnel which is an interface between the entertainment industry of eastern India and the Government. During his multifarious career he came in contact with eminent personalities and saw the evolution of this organization from its initial days to being a regionwide entity.
Madhu Eravankara is a film director, film critic, film scholar,film jury, film teacher, and author. He was born in Eravankara in Alappuzha District, Kerala, India.
Anjali Menon is an Indian filmmaker and screenwriter who predominantly works in Malayalam cinema. Anjali has won international, national and state awards for her work and is best known for her feature films Manjadikuru,Kerala Cafe(Happy Journey),Ustad Hotel, Bangalore Days, Koode and Wonder Women. She is counted among the change agents in Indian cinema whose work gets attention from the audience and the critics.
Federation of Film Societies of India (FFSI) is the umbrella body of film-screening societies in India. FFSI is currently a member of the International Federation of Film Society that has its Central Office in Paris. The international organisation is an associate member of UNESCO.
Amrit Gangar is an Indian film scholar, historian, critic, curator and writer from Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.
Kanyaka Talkies is a 2013 Indian Malayalam-language film co-written and directed by K R Manoj in his feature directorial debut. It is based on a story by P. V. Shajikumar.
Amit Dutta is an Indian experimental filmmaker and writer. He is considered to be one of the most significant contemporary practitioners of experimental cinema, known for his distinctive style of filmmaking rooted in Indian aesthetic theories and personal symbolism resulting in images that are visually rich and acoustically stimulating. His works mostly deal with subjects of art history, ethno-anthropology and cultural inheritance through cinema, many times merging research and documentation with an open imagination.
Ritesh Batra is an Indian film director and screenwriter. Batra's Hindi-language debut feature film The Lunchbox premiered at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and won the Rail d’Or. Batra also won the Toronto Film Critics Association Award for Best First Feature Film in 2014. The Lunchbox was the highest-grossing foreign film in North America, Europe and Australia for 2014 grossing over US$25 Million. The film was also nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language in 2015.
Chaitanya Tamhane is an Indian filmmaker, known for the 2014 Marathi courtroom drama Court. It was announced as India's official submission for the 88th Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category. The film examines the Indian legal system through the trial of an aging folk singer in a lower court in Mumbai.
Sanal Kumar Sasidharan is an Indian poet, lawyer, and filmmaker.
Namrata Joshi is an Indian film critic based in New Delhi. Originally working for Outlook, she remained there from 1999 till 2015, when she joined The Hindu. She won the National Film Award for Best Film Critic in 2004
Film Critics Circle of India (FCCI) is a society comprising notable film critics from all the major film producing states of India.
Manoj Barpujari, a film critic and a journalist based in Guwahati, received the Swarna Kamal for the best film critic at the National Film Awards (2011). He was a member at a time of three film critics associations in India – FIPRESCI, Film Critics Circle of India (FCCI), and Indian Film Critics Association (IFCA). Representing the Indian chapter of Fipresci mainly, of which he is a member till date, he served as juror at several well known international film festivals including those of Busan, Hong Kong, Port of Spain, Almaty, Dhaka, Kerala, Kolkata, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad. Besides, he covered the Times BFI London Film Festival twice as an accredited journalist. He conducted workshops on film criticism at the University of West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad (2012), Cotton University under the auspices of Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) with Gauhati Cine Club (2023), University of Science and Technology Meghalaya (2023) and J.B. College, Jorhat (2017) etc. He had also presented documentaries from the North-East India at the media and communications department of Goldsmiths College, London (2008). He is an executive member of the India chapter of the international federation of film critics (FIPRESCI) and serves as a member of the editorial board of its web journal E-CineIndia.
M. K. Raghavendra is an Indian film/literary scholar, theorist, critic and writer who had, till 2016, authored six volumes on cinema, and contributed to numerous newspapers and periodicals in India and outside. He received the Swarna Kamal, the National Award for Best Film Critic in 1997.
SiGNS Film Festival is one of the short film and documentary film festivals in India. The tenth edition was conducted in October 2018 in association with the Kochi-Muziris Biennale
Utpal Borpujari is a double National Film Award winner; one, as a film critic, and the other, as a filmmaker. In 2003, he won the Swarna Kamal for Best Film Critic at the 50th National Film Awards of India. In 2018, he won the National Film Award, and 5 Assam State Film Awards for his debut feature film Ishu
Amshan Kumar is an Indian filmmaker and writer. He has won a National Film Award for his documentary film Yazhpanan Thedchanamoorthy - Music beyond boundaries in the year 2015. This is a lone Tamil non-fiction film to win a National Award in the past 17 years prior to this award He is also a writer on films, his book Cinema Rasanai on film appreciation is being used as a textbook in many universities. His debut feature film Oruththi was selected for the 2003 International Film Festival of India and was screened in the Indian Panorama section. His second feature film Manusangada was screened in the 39th Cairo International Film Festival and also in the 48th International Film Festival of India (2017) in the Indian Panorama section. He lives in Chennai.
