Dikhyaa Mohanty 
From June 7 to 9, the Bhubaneswar Film Festival (BFF) will host a three-day exclusive Odia film festival at Jaydev Bhawan and Gita Gobinda Sadan here. BFF choose April 28 to make the news since it was on this day in 1936, 27 days after Odisha became the first state to be divided into linguistic regions in British India, that the province began producing films with “Sita Bibaha.” The Odia film festival will open at Jaydev Bhawan on the evening of June 7.
Prominent Odisha and Mumbai cinema personalities are anticipated to grace the festival. The festival’s co-convenor and renowned Mumbai sound designer Subash Sahoo claimed that an occasion like this hasn’t been seen in Odia cinema for more than 20 years.
“The idea is to gather a host of film personalities to interact, craft ideas and possibilities for the industry, enable a wider audience to watch old classics while encouraging award-winning films which couldn’t be released in movie halls,” said Sahoo.
“We expect that the festival will be a great opportunity for students of cinema who can glean creative insights from engagements with directors, screenwriters, archivists and scribes present for the event. At a time when Odia cinema is slowly reviving from a slumber, a festival like this is a humble effort to bring back Odia film lovers back to cinema and relive its past cinematic glories and excellence,” Sahoo hoped.
