So one hopes to get nostalgic about Stuart Granger and Ava Gardner as they meet at the Bhowani Junction, follow the life of the Mahatma in the Oscar-splashed Gandhi of Sir Richard Attenborough, go through The Book of Jungle as did Zoltan Korda and also experience the serenity of Bernard Favre's Pondicherry.

Sir David Lean's caricature of Dr Aziz in A Passage to India would have helped highlight the skewed vision of the Raj, but then there's no word on whether the Victor Banerjee-starrer will finally make it. On the other hand, talks are on with the producers of Rolland Joffe's City Of Joy, but sources in the festival directorate saidfunds could end up playing spoilsport.

This despite the fact that the Government has for the first time allowed the Directorate of Film Festivals of India (DFFI) to pay $ 300 per foreign film, that too with the rider that only 10 films can be got this way. ``This is an extremely encouraging beginning,'' said Malati Sahai, Director, DFFI. ``The idea of festival screenings have changed worldwide. It is no longer viewed in the traditional sense of `artistic promotion' and hence not free. It has now become very much a part of the entire marketing scheme of a film and one must pay up in order to get good, meaningful cinema for our festival,'' she told The Indian Express.

Looks like the results are showing. No wonder Louis Malle's documentary feature Phantom India and Fritz Lang's The Tiger of Bengal find place in the Visions section. But as for American films, there will be less of them this time. ``Now that most American films are getting released here within months of its internationalrelease, we seem to have been relieved of the responsibility of including at least 12-15 US films. So this time we'll focus a bit more on other cinema,'' said Sahai.

Indicative of this is the tribute to Akira Kurosawa and the retrospective on the little known Polish film-maker and writer Wojciech Jerzy Has. A contemporary of Andrej Wajda, his films are however different, focusing on the metaphysical instead of answering the notions of committed cinema. Throughout Has's career that began in 1948, he has received a number of festival awards -- Locarno ('59), San Sebastian ('65), Cannes ('74) -- and Hyderabad will see at least 10 of his films, including The Noose, The Doll and The Fabulous Journey of Balthazar.

The Indian retrospectives will see a package on Shabana Azmi, Savitri and Bhanumati Ramakrishna in recognition of their ``contribution to the Indian Film Industry''-- DFFI agreed to the last two after accusations it was ``ignoring the Telugu film industry''. And to further debunk thatclaim, Andhra Pradesh has been given a free hand to choose some top Telugu films which will be screened as separate package during the festival.

There will also be the customary Indian Panorama -- 16 features and 20 non-features. The selection is as lacklustre as before with only a handful holding out promise -- Jahnu Barua's Kukhal (Assamese), Tapan Sinha's Ajab Gayer Ajab Katha, Ashoke Viswanathan's Kichchu Sanlap Kichchu Pralap (both Bengali), Santosh Sivan's The Terrorist (Tamil), Girish Kasaravalli's Thai Saheb (Kannada), T V Chandran's Mangamma (Malayalam), Piyush Jha's Chalo Amerika (Hindi) and of course the celebrated Satya by Ram Gopal Varma. Among the other Indian films to be screened are those under Visions of India -- Shyam Benegal's Bhumika, Santwana Bordolio's Adajya, Girish Kasaravalli's Kravuya and V Shantaram's Sajrek.