The press conference to unveil the festival plans saw a predominance of Bollywood personalities, including Anupam Kher, Rahul Bose, Ashoke Pandit and Madhur Bhandarkar who all have films featured at IFFI.
This year's festival runs from November 23 to December 3 at India's premiere seaside city.
The chief guest for the opening ceremony has been confirmed as Shashi Kapoor, and Aparna Sen will be the chief guest at the closing. The opening film is Pedro Almodovar's Volver while the festival closes with Babel .
Films from around 40 countries will be presented in the Cinema of the World section.
Other sections are Indian Panorama, Indian Retrospectives (the late Govindan Aravindan), Indian mainstream section, NFDC Down the Ages, Indian premieres and Homages/Tributes (Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Nadira, Naushad, Dr Raj Kumar, Oduvil Unnikrishnan, P Bhanumati, Padmini, Prithviraj Kapoor, S D Burman, Satyajit Ray). The international retrospectives include Javier Bardem (Spanish actor) and Rolf De Heer.
IFFI is a competitive festival with three prizes; the best film will be awarded the Golden Peacock, the Silver Peacock will be given to the most promising director and a special jury award will be given to the director of a film for his individual artistic contribution.
The international jury for these awards is being headed by Rolf De Heer ( Australia).
The jury also includes Jahnu Barua (India) and Olivier Assayas (France). The Indian Panorama feature film jury is headed by Saeed Mirza while the non-feature jury head is Raja Mitra.
Besides a variety of films from across India and the world, IFFI also offers a Film Bazaar, beach screenings, mobile cinema, children's workshops, master classes, street animation and music concerts.
Among the celebrated filmmakers expected to attend is Sir Richard Attenborough whose Gandhi is being screened as a tribute to the Satyagraha movement.
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