Festival Release Connecting Great Cinema with Audiences across the Country

The Jagran Film Festival (JFF) is more than just cinema. As they continue to create a culture of cinema appreciation, its 9th edition will focus on new categories in a sincere attempt to connect great cinema and content, with the nationwide audiences.

JFF has introduced a new competition category of Indian Documentary Features this year, comprising internationally acclaimed and award-winning docus such as: -

Rahul Jain’s Machines

Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla’s An Insignificant Man and Ask the Sexpert

Suman Ghosh’s The Argumentative Indian

Anushka Meenakshi and Ishwar Srikumar’s Up Down & Sideways

Onir’s Raising The Bar

Kamal Swaroop’s Pushkar Puran

The Indian Documentaries category will have a special jury consisting of credible journalists, led by Sudhir Mishra.

The India Features Competition includes award-winning films in varied languages including:

three Malayalam films, Lijo Jose Pellissery’s next Ee. Ma.

Yau, Zakaria Edayur’s Sudani From Nigeria,

Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s S Durga,

Rima Das’ Village Rockstars, (Assamese)

Abhay Simha’s Paddayi (Tulu)

Atanu Ghosh’s Mayurakshi (Bengali)

Pushpendra Singh’s Ashwathhama (Brijbhasha)

Three Smoking Barrels (6 different North East languages)

Anurag Kashyap’s Mukkabaaz

Shoojit Sircar’s October

Meghna Gulzar’s Raazi 

The Shorts program will include India and International shorts competition and a non-competition category of Hot Shorts. 

The curated India Shorts Competition segment will feature languages shorts from across the country such as:

Scattered (Kashmiri)

Paashi (Pahadi, Hindi)

Eye Test (Malayalam)

Adrift (Bengali)

Valay (Marathi) including a dialogue-less short

Rozana, a documentary short

Bismaar Ghar (Gujarati) and

Abhishek Verma’s animation short Hide and Seek.

The segment includes two World Premieres, Vikas Chandra’s Maya (Hindi) starring Kirti Kulhari and Naveen Kasturia and Koel Sen’s Valay (Marathi) and five India Premieres of internationally acclaimed shorts, Ruthy Pribar’s The Caregiver (English, Hebrew, Gujarati), Reema Sengupta’s Counterfeit Kunkoo (Marathi, Hindi), Mansi Jain’s Everything Is Fine starring Seema Pahwa and Paulomi Ghosh (Hindi), animation shorts Hide and Seek and Ajitpal’s Singh’s Humming Bird (Hindi) shot in Ladakh.

International Shorts Competition features internationally acclaimed narratives, docu and animation shorts from 2017-18. The curated program will showcase World Premiere of Chachura (Argentina) and India Premiere of award-winning narrative shorts such as:

Hung Yi Wu’s On The Waitlist (Taiwan)

The Bridge (Brazil),

Lilly Within the Clouds (France)

Bubble (Iran/Australia)

Three Men (Iceland)

Meerim Dogdurboka’s Bakyt (Kyrgystan)

Odd Job Man (Denmark)

Fish (Estonia)

The Carpenters (China, USA, a docu short, Manicure (Egypt) and

An animation short My Mum’s Bonkers (South Africa).

The non-competitive shorts segment Hot Shorts features some of the best shorts in recent years including:

Payal Kapadia’s award-winning short, Afternoon Clouds, (Cinefondation, Cannes Film Festival 2017), Aaba (Berlinale 2017), animation shorts, Tokri and Maacher Jhol and Soundproofstarring Soha Ali Khan.

Thematic Specials will screen two documentaries in the Fan section, Being Bhaijaan, a documentary on Salman Khan and For The Love Of A Man, a documentary on Rajnikanth.

The City focus – Mumbai will feature two films, Tu Hai Mera Sunday and Court, State focus -Maharashtra will feature acclaimed Marathi films Killa and Madhuri Dixit starrer Bucket List and Country focus will showcase some of the best films from Argentina. Their will be an Acheivers Segment featuring best of the biopics.

The India Showcase category takes us on an emotional rollercoaster with films like Turup by Ektara Collective, Bioscopewallah starring Danny Denzongpa, The Hungry, Devashish Makhija’s Ajji and Kuch Bheege Alfaaz. 

World Panorama category will feature films like Fan of Amoory, a sweet Arabic film that follows a young boy as he goes through challenges to achieve his dream of becoming a professional football player. 

The newly introduced Student Focus category introduces movies like Death Lay Here, a short horror film about a young man who comes across a box with a hidden secret. Gift, the story of a family reacting to a foreign object entering their home and their struggle against its power. 

This year, JFF received nearly 3500 submissions across genres from 100

countries. The curated program will showcase over 200 films. The competition

segment will includeInternational and Indian Features, Shorts, Indian

Documentaries and Student Films. The non-competitive segment will include

Thematic Specials, a Retrospective, Tributes, India Showcase, World Panorama and Hot Shorts. 

The 2018 edition of the Jagran Film Festival that will connect 18 cities and showcase over 200 films will commence in Delhi and tour to other Indian cities like Kanpur, Lucknow, Allahabad, Varanasi, Patna, Dehradun, Ranchi, Jamshedpur, Bhopal, Indore, Gorakhpur, Agra, Ludhiana, Hissar, Meerut and Raipur before concluding in Mumbai in September.