Filmmaker Pooja Bhatt attends a meeting of the Goa film festival in Delhi. (AFP)

New Delhi, Nov. 19: The India International Film Festival is pulling out all stops to make sure it is not labelled a poor imitation of Cannes.

The latest edition of the 10-day film extravaganza in Goa, opening on Thursday, promises to be rich in content.

More than 200 films will be screened and the organisers have thrown open the competition section for cinema from Latin America and Africa. Last year, only Asian films were considered.

Taking a cue from other similar events across the world, the directorate of the Goa film festival has introduced a section called master’s classes ? a forum where an established filmmaker will be pitted against an upcoming one to debate on and discuss the various nuances of cinema.

The first session will see director Shyam Benegal versus Keira Chaplin, the granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin. Then, it will be French filmmaker Alain Corneau’s turn and he will face Madhur Bhandarkar, whose latest offering, Page 3, made waves at the box-office. The third pair will be British director Simon Ralph and Sudhir Mishra, whose most recent release was Hazaron Khwaishein.

“The idea is to place the experienced against the experiencing,” said Vijay Singh, the Paris-based director of films like One Dollar Curry and Jaya Ganga.

The festival will open with Brazilian film Olga, directed by Jayme Monjardim.

Prakash Jha’s Apaharan, starring Ajay Devgan and Bipasha Basu, will be premiered at the festival when it touches the half-way mark.

Jha, who introduced the film here, said it deals with kidnapping which has become a thriving industry. The director said that in Bihar alone, close to Rs 100 crore is paid as ransom in a year.

The competition section will have 16 films from 13 countries. India will be represented by Nagesh Kukunoor’s Iqbal and Malayalam film Perumazhakkalam.

The festival will pay homage to two Indian personalities ? Sunil Dutt and Gemini Ganeshan ? who died this year.

The foreign retrospective section will feature German actor and director Lena Wertmuller’s films and those starring French actor Isabelle Huppert. Seven recent Iranian films will also be screened.

The Indian section will have seven of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s films. Actor and Rajya Sabha MP Jaya Bachchan, who starred in many of Mukherjee’s films, has been invited as a special guest for the retrospective.

The Indian Panorama section will screen 21 films, including both mainstream and non-feature.

For the public, special screenings on the beaches of Goa will be the highlight of the festival.

Afzal Amanullah, the director of the festival, said the beach screenings would be held on a huge scale and are expected to invite large crowds. He added that Goa would be the permanent venue for the festival.

Amanullah also clarified that the directorate has not taken a decision on who the chief guest of the festival would be, although the National Film Federation has suggested a name. He hastened to add it is not Amitabh Bachchan.

According to Amanullah, the Goa government is organising several events in the run-up to the festival and Bachchan could have been invited to one of them.