Cancelling the IFFK will affect the future of the festival, says director Adoor Gopalakrishnan.
“It's an annual event where we screen films completed in the last year and it will be difficult to bring those films into the festival’s framework later. What we can do is to conduct it in an austere manner by scaling down the number of films, guests and events. We can also skip the Life Time Achievement Award this time, but cancelling the IFFK will be a blunder. By doing that, the continuity of the festival will be lost, leading to a lot of issues in organising it later,” he says.
He also thinks suspending the fete will leave out an entire spectrum of films from being part of the festival.
“According to the festival protocol, only films produced within a particular time frame can be part of categories such as international competition and there is no provision to accommodate them the next year. And we shouldn't forget that a lot of people across the globe are currently looking forward to IFFK 2018,” he said. Mr. Gopalakrishnan adds that the decision will ruin the momentum of the festival and it will be a real task to bring it back on track. “The only sensible option is to conduct the IFFK in a simple style, retaining only the key sections and calling off the rest,” he says.