Screening at KIFF halts twice

When a festival is off to a flying start, the least we can expect is tempers shouldn’t fly. But Team Pupahad reasons to be peeved on Day One of Kolkata International Film Festival! Indrasish Acharya’s relationship saga starring Rahul, Kamaleswar Mukherjee, Sudiptaa Chakraborty and others is the sole Bengali film in the national competition section — India Select — this year. After the press con, where the director spoke about attempting to change the way Bengali cinema is looked at, the team was in for a bitter surprise at the evening’s screening.
After the first 35 minutes, a technical snag halted the screening for 30 minutes and when it finally started, another projection issue cropped up, putting a spanner on the show. “Even the jury members left. I was worried, but they asked me for the film’s link. Watching a film on the big screen is not the same as watching it on laptop,” rued Indrasish. The audience too left in hordes after the second technical snag; among them was Ranjit Mallick. Said Sudiptaa, “Though I was not there, I had people calling me all evening. Our film is in the competition section, but the bad projection system did the film a great deal of damage.” Seems like the technical team out of sync with the director’s call for change. This problem plagued the festival last year too...