SPB is Indian Film Personality of the Year

Legendary singer SP Balasubramanyam will be presented Centenary Award for Indian Film Personality of the Year for his contribution to Indian cinema at the International Film Festival of India 2016, Goa.

The announcement for the same was made at the curtain raiser press conference that was attended by M Venkaiah Naidu, Minister of Information & Broadcasting, Francis D’Souza, Deputy Chief Minister of Goa, Col.

Rajyavardhan Rathore, Minister of State for I&B, Cho Hyun, Ambassador Republic of Korea and Ajay Mittal, Secretary I&B.

SPB, as he is lovingly referred to; Balasubramanyam has completed five decades of playback singing in the Indian film industry. He began his singing career in Telugu cinema and went on to sing in all south languages and gave quite many hit songs for Hindi films too.

He holds the record in the Guinness Book for singing and recording more than 40,000 songs and has won the National Award six times. He was honoured with the Padma Shri (2001) and Padma Bhushan (2011) by the Government of India.

Mentioning the highlights of IFFI 2016, Venkaiah Naidu spoke about the Film Promotion fund. The fund would provide financial assistance to the films which would be selected in any competition section of an International Film Festival of repute or being India’s official nomination to the Academy Awards under Foreign Film Category, for promotional activities, he said.

The festival will be held at Goa between November 20 and November 28. 194 films out of 1032 entries from 88 countries are selected for screening at the festival. The opening film of the festival would be the grand masterpiece, ‘After-Image’, a creation of veteran writer and director, late. Andrzej Wajda (andre wajda).

This movie is a passionate biopic about avant-garde painter Wladyslaw Strzeminski (Wlady-slaw Strz-aim-inski). The closing film of 47th IFFI would be the South Korean official entry for the Academy Awards, ‘The Age of Shadows’, directed by Kim Jee Woon.

Republic of Korea will be the country in focus, and Korean Writer and Director Im Kwon Taek (Im Kwa Teek) will be awarded Lifetime Achievement Award.

Indian actor, director and producer Ajay Devgn, will be the Chief Guest for the opening ceremony, director SS Rajamouli will be the Chief Guest at the closing ceremony of the much awaited film festival.

Another son of soil to be in limelight at the festival in Goa is the award winning director, Nagesh Kukunoor who is on the International Jury.