At the ‘world premiere’ of Anirudh Roy Chowdhury’s Anuranan, lead actor Rahul Bose had to give away his seat. To this writer, left stranded in the filled-to-capacity tiny INOX theatre, it was a boon: the aisles, I was told by a frowning official brandishing a crackling walkie-talkie, were out of bounds too.

The seat was plumb in the front row. But you don’t look a gift-horse and a co-operative Bose in the mouth, and two hours later, I walked out of the theatre with a crick in the neck. But at least that was one film I actually got to watch.

An obvious thing for a weathered film critic on the job to do, you’d think, but something which has turned into a monumental enterprise in Goa this year. The queues are endless. The separate queue for the media and delegates, created after two days of yelling and shouting, works only up to a point: theatres fill up much before you reach the doors.

The International Film Festival 2006 is two days away from closing, and has the dubious distinction of having attained near-mythic status in terms of chaos and mismanagement. The organisers clearly believe in not stopping at one boo-boo a day: part of the amusing sideshow at this fest, like at all other fests, is doing the numbers, and right from day one, IFFI ‘06 has been ringing the change as fast as it can manage.

The widespread fear that Bollywood babes Bipasha, Esha and Priyanka along with the other attendees, would get stuck to the stage, which was being painted till a minute before the show started, was unfounded. But all other misgivings were rapidly confirmed. The multiplicity of authority, a huge bugbear of IFFI even before it moved to Goa three years ago, has become even more acute. The split between the Press Information Bureau (PIB), the Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF) and the Entertainment Society of Goa (ESG) is wide open: everyone is happily blaming the other for the ongoing debacles.

... contd.