Mysore/Mysuru: If you are a film buff, this Dasara could be right up your street as you can watch over 112 films in seven days with nominal prices during Dasara Film Festival from Sept. 27 to Oct. 3.

The festival will also feature workshops on short film making hosted by noted film directors and a short film-making competition.

The to-be-screened films will include foreign films and panorama films in various Indian languages from across the country including Kannada. The main attraction of the film festival will be the movies of Dr. Puneeth Rajkumar, lovingly called ‘Appu,’ who has left a huge void in the cinema industry with his untimely death.

After his death, his movie ‘James’ hit the screens and now his fans have no way to enjoy his movies and dances on the big screen. “So we want to fill this gap by dedicating one day of the film festival to Puneeth Rajkumar where his blockbuster movies and movies with a social message will be screened including the famed Bettada Hoovu,” T.K. Harish, Assistant Director of Information Department, who is also the Member-Secretary of Dasara Film Festival Sub-Committee, told Star of Mysore this morning.

While the film festival will be inaugurated on Sept. 26, the next day, Sept. 27, will be dedicated to Puneeth Rajkumar. The films during the festival will be screened at DRC Cinemas (B.M. Habitat Mall, Jayalakshmipuram) and INOX (Mall of Mysore, M.G. Road) and four films will be screened on one screen each day. 

CM Basavaraj Bommai and Hat-trick Hero Shivarajkumar will inaugurate the film festival on the evening of Sept. 26, he added.

“Three screens have been given by INOX and the management of DRC Cinemas has handed over one screen free of cost to us. We will release a list of cinemas to be screened,” said T.K. Harish, Assistant Director of Information.

This festival will see the screening of 112 movies including 28 Kannada movies, 28 panorama cinemas and 28 world cinemas. “In all, viewers will get to see 84 movies in INOX and 28 movies in DRC Cinemas,” he added.

Cinema pre-production

In addition to screening of movies, a film workshop — ‘cinema pre-production’ — will be held on Sept. 22, 23 and 24 at Rani Bahadur Auditorium with an entry fee of Rs. 500. The workshop will impart training on high-impact and popular movie-making with limited budgets

The film workshop will be inaugurated by noted director  Nagathihalli Chandrashekar and the workshop attendees will get a free pass to watch the cinemas. “Like in earlier years, the charges to view the cinemas will be nominal and there will be concessions for the deserving sections like the senior citizens,” Harish added. 

Short film competition

As part of the film festival, a short film-making competition will be conducted and the total duration of the films must not exceed five minutes, including the title display time. One person can submit multiple entries and the movies must not show any downloaded content from the websites, stills, photography, scenes, stock images, song or music or any plagiarised or similar content or idea.   

All the short films that are shot in other languages (not Kannada) must mandatorily have subtitles. Applications can be downloaded from https://bit.ly/3QYKoKW and the Google form must be filled and a payment of Rs. 100 has to be made from the given QR Code.

Once registered, the short films can be submitted in MP4 format and uploaded on Google Drive or can be uploaded to YouTube. The link has to be mentioned in the application format after filling in suitably. The last date to submit the applications and films will be Sept. 12. The winning short film will get a prize of Rs. 10,000, Rs. 8,000 and Rs. 5,000 for the first, second and third place respectively and there will be two consolation prizes of Rs. 2,000 each.