Shekhar Kapur to serve as international competition jury head for IFFI 23

New Delhi, October 31

Renowned filmmaker Shekhar Kapur would be the jury head of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) 2023 in Goa next month.

The five-member jury also includes cinematographer Jose Luis Alcaine, producers Jerome Paillard, Catherine Dussart and Helen Leake, said a press release.

“The international jury will select the winner of the coveted best film award which includes the Golden Peacock, Rs 40 lakh monetary component and certificates for the director and producer. Apart from the best film, the jury will also determine winners in the best director, best actor (male), best actor (female) and special jury prize categories,” it added.

The international jury would also pick the winner for the festival’s best debut feature film of a director award that would see seven first-time filmmakers compete for the coveted Silver Peacock, Rs 10 lakh and a certificate.

Kapur is known for directing classics such as ‘Masoom’ and ‘Mr India’. He successfully branched out to Hollywood with the Oscar-nominated period drama ‘Elizabeth’, ‘The Four Feathers’ and ‘Elizabeth: The Golden Age’.

For the current edition of IFFI, which would run from November 20 to 28, the organisers have received ‘a record breaking 2926 entries from 105 countries’.

Last year, the festival had run into a controversy after Nadav Lapid, the jury head of IFFI, had criticised filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri’s ‘The Kashmir Files’ as ‘vulgar’ and a ‘propaganda’.

‘The Kashmir Files’, which depicted the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits during militancy in the early 1990s, was screened under the Indian Panorama section at the festival.