I have great pleasure in welcoming you all to the 12th Indian Film Festival of Ireland 2021 (IFFI), at this virtual platform, second consecutive year as we are still in unprecedented and challenging times. Although life is gradually becoming normal, as almost 90% are vaccinated as a nation in Ireland, there is still a concern looming about the new variant. The dangerous virus has taken over several million lives so far, worldwide and still exists among us as we go on and try our best to make some sense of our existence and this festival.

As many of you know that the IFFI has been established over the past decade as Ireland’s boutique film festival, introducing the world’s largest film industry, the Indian cinema to the Irish audience. The IFFI 2021 is delighted to reinvent and recreate its structure, and will have three distinct features, we shall be screening films, simultaneously recently recorded interviews with the leading talent Farhan Akhtar of the opening film Toofan, as well as a section called “talent from the industry”, in which we talked to almost all from the different walks of life who work in different capacity such as script writer, acting coach, actors, producers, director, cameraman, editors, the publicist and many more.

We are playing a retrospective of late Dilip Kumar one feature film each day. The closing film is called all time Favorite classical film Mughal-e-Azam. This is to give tribute to a thespian – Dilip Kumar, who is no longer amongst us. There is a tribute section for those who left the industry in 2020 /2021.

Several Live Indian classical dancers are specially performing for the IFFI 2021 in order to complement and celebrate the Indian dance art form incorporated in our films, such as Kathak and Bharatnatyam, an Indian classical and semi dance form.

Several old classical and popular films are scheduled over the period of four days for our audience to enjoy the glory of Indian Cinema in all its fascinating forms.

The festival would like to welcome the newly arrived Indian Ambassador to Ireland H.E.Shri. Akhilesh Mishra.

We are now developing our own Irish-Indian cross-over fiction and non-fiction films to be made here and so creating an Irish-India film production corridor.