Ramesh Sippy, the director of the magnum opus, Sholay, has been invited to deliver the Satyajit Ray Memorial Lecture at the 31st Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF).
The maker of the film that turned 50 this year will deliver the talk at Sisir Mancha on November 7.
The eight-day festival, on which a news meet took place on Tuesday, will be inaugurated the day before, on November 6, at Dhono Dhanyo Auditorium, where Saptapadi, the Uttam Kumar-Suchitra Sen-starrer, will be exhibited as the opening film.
There will be 215 films in 18 Indian and 30 foreign languages shown on 20 screens in venues across the city — Nandan, Rabindra Sadan, Sisir Mancha, Rabindra Okakura Bhavan, Radha Studio, Nazrul Tirtha, Navina, Star Theatre, Menoka, Ajanta, PVR Mani Square, Inox Metro, Inox Quest, Inox South City, Globe, New Empire and Prachi.
Centenary tributes will be paid to film director Ritwik Ghatak with the screening of six of his films. Veteran director Adoor Gopalakrishnan will discuss Ghatak on November 12 at Sisir Mancha at 4pm.
An exhibition on Ghatak will be held at the Nandan foyer. His actors, technicians and students will be felicitated on November 13 at Rabindra Sadan.
Tributes will be paid through screenings of their films to other centenarians as well — Richard Burton (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), Santosh Dutta (Joi Baba Felunath), Salil Chowdhury (Do Bigha Zameen), Raj Khosla (Bombai Ka Babu), Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch; Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid) and Polish director Wojciech Has (The Hourglass Sanatorium, The Saragossa Manuscript and The Doll).
An exhibition will showcase some of them along with Pradip Kumar and Robert Altman at Gaganendra Pradarshashala.
Special tributes will be paid to Robert Redford, Claudia Cardinale, David Lynch, Shyam Benegal, Arun Roy, Raja Mitra and Shashi Anand.
This year, the focus country is Poland, which will send 19 films and a seven-member contingent, including Agata Wasowska-Pawlik, director of the International Cultural Centre in Krakow, and the director, executive producer and lead actor of the 2025 biographical film Chopin Chopin. Monika Rosca will play a grand piano before the screening of the film on the composer.
An exhibition on “Polish cinematography in posters: The art of Andrzej Pagowski” will be held on the first floor of Gaganendra Pradarshashala.
Films in eight rare languages like Kokborok and Tulu will be screened in the Unheard India section.
Cine Adda at Ektara Mancha outdoors will
focus on themes related to music and films every evening.
A seminar on Artificial Intelligence and the future of cinema will be held at Sisir Mancha at 4pm on November 10.