Negotiations with Polygram Filmed Entertainment, the distributors of Elizabeth, are reportedly in the final stages, and barring an unforeseen hitch, this rage of the Toronto and Venice festivals is sure to hit the festival screen in Hyderabad. The other option is of course Deepa Mehta's Earth. But given her recent brushwith controversy over Fire, and the fact that Earth -- set in the Partition era -- reportedly has some graphic scenes of rioting, the DFFI might not like to open with it.

On the other hand, Elizabeth suits the festival fine. Kapur, whose critically acclaimed Bandit Queen catapulted him to the status of an international celebrity director, has wowed foreign critics and the box office with his revisionist epic that is a far cry from the sterility of British heritage movies. Starring Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Joseph Feinnes and Richard Attenborough, Elizabeth is said to be dazzling in its cinematography and sensual in style.

Set in England circa 1554 when Protestants were being burnt at the stake, Kapur's Elizabeth captures the age's intensity and oddity as it charts the Queen's fascinating, intriguing, violence-riddled journey from innocence to experience. The ending has drawn some welcome controversy though with Kapur questioning history and not letting her be the Virgin Queen everyone thinks shewas.

But Kapur's Elizabeth isn't the only surprise. The Last Emperor Bernardo Bertolucci will be coming, and the DFFI, sources say, is sure he won't ditch. And among the 75 films to be screened in the Cinema of the World section, the Italian auteur's Beseiged is sure to find place.

And in keeping with the policy of having films that have won awards or critical acclaim, the festival will be seeing some of the works of Claude Chabrol (France), Theo Angelopoulos (Greece), Pavel Chukrai (Russia) and John Boorman (Ireland). Angelopoulos's Eternity And A Day won the Cannes Palme d'or and is already being compared to Krysztof Kieslowski's Three Colours trilogy in terms of richness and cultural references; while Chukrai's The Thief, which follows in the footsteps of the several recent Russian cinematic recapitulations of the Stalin period, swept the board at the Russian Oscars and was even nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film.Boorman's The General is undoubtedly another prized catch--through afictionalised account of Ireland's most notorious criminal of recent years Martin Cahill, it uses crime among society's fringes as a subtle tool to explore the tensions at work in modern-day Ireland.

Other notable entrants are Shohei Imamurai's Kanzo Sensei (a France-Japan co-production), Tom Tykwer's Winter Sleepers (Germany), Jalili's Dawn (Iran), Francois Veber's Dinner Game (France), Nanni Moretti's Aprile (France-Italy) and Jean Marie Poiree's The Corridor of Time (France).And as for American films, Robert Redford's The Horse Whisperer is the only one yet to be confirmed and there is no word yet on Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowskie and the politically resonant, Primary Colors.