Several topics were discussed on the opening day of the festival. Anurag Thakur largely spoke about the boycott trend. He said, “I will say two things on this, the Indian government has made central board of film certification and all films has to get an approval from that. After getting approval from CBFC then only a film releases in theatres. If any one has any objection they mail us and we discuss that with CBFC.”
He further shared the procedure to reach out to the ministry in case anyone has any complaints. He added, “As far as OTT is concerned, to avoid restrictions on creativity we opted for the self-certification mode. If anyone has any complaints then there are 3 steps I.e Producer level, Association level and Intro departmental committee level. 55% of the issues get resolved at the first two levels. So I believe in a country like India where we want to grow our soft power, these types of discussion does impact us and the environment. Sometimes people create problems without even knowing about the subject which should not be done.”
Akshay Kumar spoke about the impact of Indian cinema globally, at the event. He expressed, “India is growing globally more and more…this year we went to Golden Globe and won there…we secured so many nominations at Oscar this year. Things are moving so fast… all those things we are doing are getting picked up by societies.”