FTII wins accolades

The Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) has won seven awards for the non-feature category in 2004-05. The institute participated in around 100 national and international film festivals.

The films were produced by its 2004-05 batch. Besides, it also bagged the first prize in the Munich Film Festival for an adfilm made by one of its second-year student.

"A Marathi film Girni by Umesh Kulkarni picked up a national award for the best non-feature film, the best director and the best cinematography. Another Marathi film Dwijaa got a national award for the best film on social issues. Saanjh won the best film award for family welfare and Kshyatraghya was adjudged the best experimental film," said Chandreshekhar Joshi, film research officer, FTII.

"The first batch of the television course also bagged a national award for Cradle Song in the short fiction film category. A second year student Debashish Medekar won the first prize of euro 10,000 at the Munich International Film Festival in Germany for an adfilm Konig Ludwig Beer," he added.

"We also organised our own film festival 'Lensight' in Mumbai," said Joshi. On institute's future plans, he said, "We plan to increase our participation in national and international film festivals and also take Lensight to Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata this year."

The institute has also received an invitation from San Francisco for participating in the International Asian Film Festival in March for award winnig film 'Girni'.

The institute was established in 1960. At present, it has 12 post graduate diploma courses in fields such as film making, television and also animation and graphics.

"Keeping in view that television has become a huge entertainment medium, we launched four courses in television three years back. And now with technology becoming integral part of film-making, we have introduced animation, computer graphics and art direction in 2005-06," he said.