The Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF) turns 30 this year with Goutam Ghose back as chairman and with Tapan Sinha’s 1966 film Galpo Holeo Satti as the inaugural film to be screened at Dhana Dhanyo auditorium on December 4.

The director, who turned 100 this October, will also be the theme of an exhibition at the foyer of Nandan, the main venue of KIFF, and four other films of his (Harmonium, Nirjan Saikate, Kabuliwala and Banchharamer Bagan, the last being also a tribute to the recently departed Manoj Mitra) will be screened. A seminar will also be held on Sinha on December 11, after which artistes and technicians who worked in his films will be felicitated. Cine adda will be held daily from December 5 to 10 from 6pm at Ektara Mukta Mancha.

Centenary tributes will be paid to Marlon Brando, Marcello Mastroianni, Akkineni Nageswara Rao, Sergei Parajanov, Arundhati Debi and Harisadhan Dasgupta.

Cinegoers will get to see Brando on screen in the 1972 classic The Godfather and Viva Zapata, directed by Elia Kazan.

One of the two best-known collaborations of Mastroani with Federico Fellini, La Dolce Vita, which had the flamboyant Italian actor playing a disillusioned columnist, will be screened, as will the 1953 film Devadasu starring Rao, the Telugu actor-producer.

Dasgupta, a doyen of documentary filmmaking in India in the ’50s and ’60s, will be remembered through Eki Ange Eto Rup, starring Soumitra Chatterjee, Madhabi Mukherjee and Basanta Chowdhury. The other two centenary tributes will be the National Award-winning Bhagini Nibedita to Arundhati Debi and The Color of Pomegranates to Parajanov, the Soviet filmmaker.

Like last year, the 35mm projector at the Radha studio auditorium will be put to use to screen Utpalendu Chakraborty’s Chokh, which can be experienced on celluloid.

The announcements were made at a press meet on Friday attended by ministers Arup Biswas, Indranil Sen, and Birbaha Hansda, KIFF director-general Santanu Basu, actor Arjun Chakraborty and Nicolas Facino, the director of Alliance Francaise du Bengale.

France is the focus country this year with a bouquet of six classics (including Robert Bresson’s Lancelot of the Lake), and contemporary films. “This year’s spotlight is a testament to the shared love of story-telling and artistic innovation that connect France and Bengal. The festival also celebrates French women filmmakers and Caroline Vignat, Elise Olzenberger and Celine Rouzel will visit to present their films,” Facino said.

There will be 21 screenings, including documentary and short films, in the French bouquet.

There will be an exhibition on the three decades of the festival at Gaganendra Pradarshashala.

“This year is nostalgic for me as I was the founder-chairman 30 years back. We are upscaling the cerebral part of the festival with more seminars, symposiums and lectures,” said festival chairman Ghose.

On December 5, there will be a seminar on perception change in cinema with change in technology.

“It is an important subject with the shift from analogue to digital platforms a decade ago,” he said.

The day after, there will be an interaction with Vidya Balan who had debuted in Gautam Halder’s Bhalo Theko, which fetched sound designer Anup Mukherjee the third of his four National Awards. The film will also be screened. Other seminars will be on “Intolerance, global justice and the media”, “Explosion of shorts and documentaries in the digital era”, “Film festivals then and now” and “What is Indian national cinema”.

“It is a very important topic now as Hindi cinema is being regarded in some quarters as national cinema but Hindi is also a regional language,” Ghose said, referring to the last-named topic.

Marathi language film and theatre director Jabbar Patel will be in conversation with Samik Bandyopadhyay on December 8. A discussion on Kumar Shahani will pay tribute to the filmmaker and theorist, who died earlier this year in Calcutta.

Ghosh’s film Parikrama will have its Asian premiere at the festival, for which Marco Leonardi, an Australia-born Italian film and TV actor will be in town.

Ghose could not specify who would attend the inauguration, other than Shatrughan Sinha. The maker of films like Cheeni Kum and Paa, R. Balki, will deliver the Satyajit Ray Memorial Lecture on December 6 at Sisir Mancha.

There will be no Bangladeshi film screened this year. “The only film from Bangladesh that had applied was rejected as it was shown in Goa,” Ghose said.

The closing ceremony will be on December 11.