Manju Warrier-starrer Kayattam makes world premiere at Busan International Film Festival

Manju Warrier-starrer

Kayattam

had its world premiere at the

Busan International Film Festival

(BIFF), on Wednesday, and it opened to a warm response, says director Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, who took part virtually.

“A big attraction of film festivals is the interaction that the audience can have with the filmmakers,” says Sanal. “Under the circumstances, a virtual festival cannot offer the ambience of a proper one, but BIFF enabled this nicely with a moderator and an interpreter. And the film received good feedback.” The director says that he was amused by the fact that the idea ‘maya’, which is the theme of Kayattam, seemed to play out in a sense as the interaction was virtual.

A film festival veteran, whose S Durga featured in 65 international festivals, Sanal says, “In a way, the online interaction is something that festivals can have even after things return to normal, because it allows filmmakers to take part even if they are unable to travel to the event.”

Pointing to how the festival was conducted in the new normal, he says there were just 45 people in the theatre and foreign delegates were not allowed to fly in. The South Korean film festival is one of the very few, including the Venice Film Festival in early September, to hold a physical festival amid the pandemic. In fact, BIFF, which is being held from October 21 to 30, had been postponed by more than 10 days from the original schedule due to safety concerns.

Kayattam, shot in the snowy Himalayan peaks, is a fantasy musical set amid a mountain trek.