Eeb Allay Ooo!, Bombay Rose, Jallikkattu head to the 8th Dharamshala International Film Festival

The film festival in the Himalayas, Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF), has announced its lineup for the upcoming eighth edition. The mountain festival will be held from 7 to 10 November in McLeodganj, Dharamshala.

Prateek Vats's Eeb Allay Ooo! will open the festival while Gitanjali Rao’s animated film, Bombay Rose, will close the festival. Both filmmakers are expected to present their films.

Indian features and documentaries About Love, Aise Hee, Khanaur (Bitter Chestnut), and Oh, That’s Bhanu will be screened. Filmmakers Ekta Mittal, Gurvinder Singh, Kislay, Lijo Jose Pellissery, Priya Sen, RV Ramani and Vinod Kamble have been lined up to attend. Gurvinder Singh’s latest film, Khanaur, is being showcased in the Spotlight on Himachal section.

Besides having curated films, the festival opened up for submissions via FilmFreeway and received numerous entries.

Festival director Ritu Sarin said in a statement, “Every year we try and stay true to the principles that we set out for DIFF when we started the festival eight years ago: to select films that combine a deeply personal vision with themes that resonate with our times. This year is no different, and hopefully our line-up, which has been carefully and painstakingly curated, will showcase some of the incredible diversity of filmmaking talent on offer in the world today.”

Amongst the international films, the documentaries For Sama and Varda By Agnés will be screened, while Melina León's Song Without A Name and Teona Strugar Mitevska's God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunya are the feature films being showcased at Dharamsala.

The festival has also selected fiction and documentary shorts from Shazia Iqbal's Bebaak to Ashish Pandey's Nooreh. The DIFF Children’s Film Programme will showcase Vinod Kamble's feature, Kastoori, and the short films The Award, School Trip and Chicken At Swami’s Kitchen.

American filmmaker Jesse Alk, Swiss filmmaker Samuel Weniger, and Japanese filmmaker Kazuhiro Soda are also expected to attend. Weniger, co-director and cinematographer of Golden Age, is due to speak about exploring the creative possibilities of images in documentaries and essay films, using his film as an example. Meanwhile, Soda is expected to share his unique approach to observational documentary filmmaking. Actor Adil Hussain will be conducting an acting workshop at the festival.

"DIFF is also a place where filmmakers and film lovers can interact in an informal yet engaged way, and with our move back to the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts this year, where all of DIFF’s screenings and events will be contained within close distance of each other, we hope to create an even more intimate space for such exchanges," Sarin added.

For more information on the complete lineup, log on to http://www.diff.co.in