NEW DELHI: AFGHANISTAN will be in focus at the next edition of South Asian Film Festival to be held in Goa next month and An Apple from Paradise, set in the strife-torn country and depicting distortion of religion, is going be the opening film.
Over 50 films – feature, documentary and short – from all the SAARC countries will be screened at the festival. Prakash Jha's Rajneeti and Assamese film Basundhara, about man-elephant conflict, directed by debutant Hiren Borawill be among 10-12 films from India to be screened at the festival to be held from September 17 to 20.
Seven to eight films from Pakistan, including Yeh Pakistan Woh Hindustan and Gurmukh Singhki Wasihat and Kala Pul, will also feature in the festival with the theme ‘Dissolving Boundaries’. Besides An Apple From Paradise, two other films from Afghanistan Lala Hindu and Neighbour will be screened at the four-day festival, Foundation Director Rahul Barua told PTI.
An Apple From Paradise, directed by Homayun Morowat, who has been living in Sweden since 1998 after his debut feature film Green Ashes was banned in 1990, is a story about a father’s search for his son, a student at a religious school in Kabul, who stops attending classes and goes on a suicide bomb mission. The film was shot in Kabul in the winter of 2007.
An Apple From Paradise won the best feature film awards at international festivals in Tajikistan and Afghanistan last year. Bangladesh will be represented by five films including Noi Number Sanket (Signal No 9) directed by that country's most popular writer Humayun Ahmed and Priyotomeshu by eminent art filmmaker Morshedul Islam.
There will be a blend of South Asia in all the films to be shown at the festival, Barua said, adding some directors and actors from SAARC countries are expected to attend the event, whose co-sponsors are Indian Council For Cultural Relations and Goa government.