'We did not ignore regional directors'

Rejecting the allegations that the just-concluded International Film Festival of India (IFFI) ignored regional filmmakers, the IFFI organisers today claimed hardly any regional director responded to their invitation.

Officials of Brilliant Entertainment Network (BEN), an event management company, which organised IFFI-2006, said, "We held press conferences all over India inviting regional cinema directors to showcase themselves in the peripheral activities, but the response was virtually nill".

"Thinking that regional filmmakers would turn up with their concepts and shows, we kept open peripheral activities till a week before IFFI but unfortunately none came", Raman Raheja, BEN director, told PTI.

Several regional filmmakers and veteran actors and actresses like T V Chandran (Malayalam), Girish Kasaravalli (Kannada), Shashi Kapoor and Nandita Das have been critical of the organisation of IFFI this year.

Some of them demanded shifting of the event out of Goa citing its "lack of a cinema culture" and the "step-motherly" treatment of regional language cinema and rueing Bollywood's overwhelming presence which allegedly overshadowed other film industries.