Rabindra Okakura Bhavan has returned this year as a venue for the Kolkata International Children’s Film Festival (KICFF). It is one of the nine venues chosen for screening at the festival’s eighth edition which started here on Monday. The first film to be shown was renowned Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s Home?

“Salt Lake has a high density of residential population and we also happen to have an auditorium here. So we decided to add Rabindra Okakura Bhavan to the eight venues we had till last year,” said Sekhar Banerjee, convenor of KICFF and secretary, Shishu Kishore Akademi, under the aegis of which the festival is being held. A total of 219 films from 35 countries are being screened in the festival. Three shows are being held daily at all the venues.

Another Iranian master’s film will be on view today at Rabindra Okakura Bhavan — The Colour of Paradise, directed by Majid Majidi — at 3pm, to be followed at 6pm by an eternal favourite from Tapan Sinha, Sabuj Dwiper Raja (1979), based on Sunil Ganguly’s Kakababu thriller.

The film with which the festival was inaugurated at Nandan last Sunday — Praveen Morchhale’s Walking With the Wind — can be seen at Rabindra Okakura Bhavan on Saturday at 3pm. The film has bagged three National Awards and is also an ICFT-Unesco Gandhi medal winner. The child artiste who stars in the film, Sonam Wangail, inaugurated the festival at Nandan on Sunday. The film tells the curious story of a child who accidentally breaks a chair in school and decides to take the broken chair to his village, 7km away in the mountains, on the back of a donkey.

Sunday is dedicated to Upendrakishore Roy Chowdhury’s immortal wandering minstrels Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne. This is the golden jubilee anniversary of the release of the film made by his grandson Satyajit. The sequels, Hirak Rajar Deshe and Goopy Bagha Phire Elo, will also be shown.

The venue is also hosting an exhibition on the evolution of the movie camera on the ground floor foyer. Fibre models of 11 cameras have been built. “We want to show how technology has transformed the shooting equipment over the years,” said Banerjee, a resident of AF Block. It might be retained as permanent exhibit in the galleries upstairs, he added.

Mrinal Sen homage

New Town residents are flocking to Rabindra Tirtha. At noon today, homage will be paid to the recently departed filmmaker Mrinal Sen through the screening of his only film for children, Ichchhapuran, based on Rabindranath Tagore’s fantasy centred around a father and a son, whose bodies get swapped in response to their respective wishes of a return to childhood in one and growing up to become an adult in the other.

How to enter

There are no tickets to the festival. While delegate cards cannot be applied for anymore, authorities have made provisions for free passes to be available at the halls. Among adults, those accompanying children will be given priority.

A still from Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, one of the films to be shown at Okakura Bhavan on Sunday. A still from the film.