Celebrated actor Shabana Azmi had earlier called for a boycott of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) by the film industry as a statement against the government’s non-committal stand on the Padmavati controversy. Forget the state’s responsibility to ensure any semblance of security or creative freedom, we even had members of the ruling party unabashedly calling for the death of actor Deepika Padukone and filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali.
In such an atmosphere, Bollywood staying away from IFFI would have made a powerful statement. Instead, we saw some of the most powerful players in the film industry grace IFFI and smugly sit through various events at the festival.
Besides the Padmavati issue, IFFI this year also stood for the blatant bullying of filmmaker Sanal Kumar Sasidharan over the screening of his controversial Malayalam film Sexy Durga. The government went to ridiculous lengths to ensure that the filmmaker was gagged and his film not shown at the festival despite a High Court order.
Not a single celebrity actor who waltzed down the red carpet in sunny Goa, brought up the government’s complete disregard for their own kind or the ministry’s shameless clamping down of a fellow filmmaker’s freedom of expression.
Despite popular Bollywood films being held hostage due to one reason or the other almost every year, the silence from the fraternity at IFFI was telling. But then, with this hostage taking becoming a norm, we guess they all felt various degrees of the Stockholm syndrome.
Honest IFFI red carpet pics below:
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