All 9,812 applicants to get IFFK delegate passes
Passes to all applicants had been taken with the consent of Adoor, IFFK’s chief advisor
By : DC Correspondent
Update: 2014-11-16 07:01 GMT
Thiruvananthapuram: Aspiring delegates will not be kept out of IFFK on the basis of their inexperience or their lack of understanding of English. All the 9,812 persons who had applied till November 14, the day the registration closed, will be granted IFFK delegate passes. “None will be denied a pass,” Cinema Minister Thiruvanchoor Radhakrishnan said here on Saturday.
The number of applications received this time was an all-time record. “It has shot up from 6,000 in 2011 to nearly 10,000 this year,” he said. There was widespread criticism that the new registration process used an elaborate questionnaire to restrict the number of delegates. The questionnaire, which was prepared on the basis of the Adoor Gopalakrishnan committee report, was said to be discriminatory.
The minister said that the decision to grant passes to all applicants had been taken with the consent of Adoor, IFFK’s chief advisor. Adoor was criticised for his alleged statements that first-timers and those without English knowledge should be kept out of the festival. “This is a trumped up charge. I should be mad to make a statement that those who know only Malayalam should be kept out of the festival,” Adoor said on Saturday.
I just said that film lovers should be given prominence. And I said this not to keep out anyone but as a practical measure,” he said. The minister said that a stalwart like Adoor should not have been dragged into such a controversy. “I have talked to the KPCC chief and Youth Congress president Dean Kuriakose. Both of them did not support the march taken out by the Youth Congress to Adoor’s home,” Mr Radhakrishnan said.
He said that there were 3,873 seats in the theatres already made available for IFFK. “We are planning to get an additional 1,400 seats. If that materialises, the total number of seats will go up to 5,273. This will be in addition to Nishagandhi theatre which has a capacity of 4,000,” he said.