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Biggest Indian film fest opens in Dubai
The IIFA Weekend and Awards, which are regarded as India's equivalent of the Oscars, will showcase 32 movies.
The largest festival of Indian films was on Wednesday launched by superstar Amitabh Bachchan as some of Bollywood's biggest names gathered for the seventh annual IIFA Awards.
Bachchan, who is "brand ambassador" for the International Indian Film Academy (IIFA), said, "Our cinema requires to be seen by more people."
Launching the IIFA Weekend at a news conference, Bachchan said people in the West were initially "cynical" about attempts to promote Indian cinema around the world, but the situation had now changed.
There was also special praise from Bachchan for Dubai, the venue for the four-day festival. Describing it as a "unique miracle", he said, "It is a meeting point for the cultures of the West and of the East."
The IIFA Weekend and Awards, which are regarded as India's equivalent of the Oscars, will showcase 32 movies. They include 14 south Indian, 16 Hindi, one Marathi, one Bengali and six short films.
Actors Mamootty, Mohanlal, Meera Jasmine and Aishwarya Rai are among the stars attending the event. Rai's new movie Provoked will be premiered during the festival.
The event will culminate on June 16 with the IIFA Awards, which will be given away in two categories -- popular awards for artistic excellence and technical awards for technical excellence.
The blockbusters Black and Parineeta have bagged the maximum awards in technical categories at the IIFA Awards 2006.
Black has won awards for cinematography, editing, song recording and background score while Parineeta has been recognised for make-up and costume, sound recording, art direction and screenplay.
Other films recognised in the technical categories include Dus, Aashiq Banaya Aapne, Apaharan and Bunty Aur Babli.
The technical awards results were monitored, collated and tabulated by internationally reputed audit firm PriceWaterhouse Coopers.
The IIFA Awards were launched in 2000 in London. Since then the event has been held twice in South Africa and once in Malaysia, Singapore and the Netherlands.
