The 21st International Film Festival of Kerala (IKKF began on 9th December and closed on 16th when three different juries announced the nine prizes for the best films in their respective categories. The festival screened 184 films from 62 countries with 490 screenings across 14 beautifully maintained theatres in the city. 13000 delegates registered to watch films. The International Jury selected Suwarna Chakoram for Best Film to the Egyptian film Clash directed by Mohamed Diab and the audience prize went to the same film. The award was for “the excellent cinematographic work that so aptly explains the historical shock of his country and sketches a living portrait of all the socio-political currents represented by real, authentic and truly human characters.” 
The Rajatha Chakoram for the Best Debut Director went to Vidhu Vincent for Manhole (Malayalam) “for expressing an everyday unnoticed social issue in a simple and important, yet a powerful visual image narrative. The human and realistic story was brought to life on screen.” 
The Rajatha Chakoram for the Best Director was given away to Yesem Ustaoglu for Camera Obscur, “For its subtle, but effective cinematic treatment of a global dimension across social classes from the perspective of psychological wounds affecting women.” The NETPAC Jury gave the Best Asian Film Award to Cold of Kalandar directed by Mustafa Kara “for the purity of its cinematic brilliance in bringing out the universality of the struggle between Man and Nature, beauty and danger, love and hope…”
This Jury’s Best Malayalam Film Award went to Kammatipaadam  directed by Rajiv Ravi, an unabashedly mainstream film spilling over with graphic violence, gang-wars and songs and music “for giving an epic dimension to the issues of friendship, violence and illicit profiteering inherent to gangster films and for masterfully animating genre conventions with social, political urgency.”
The FIPRESCI Jury gave the Best International Film Award to Jack Zhaga’s Warehoused “For the way in which it challenges the conventional form, content and language of cinema in terms of use of space, narration that reaches beyond cultural, linguistic and time barriers.” Its Best Malayalam Film Award went to Manhole “For the raw reality with which the film sheds light on the persistent inhumanity of manual scavengers in India, despite its being legally banned, in a cinematically eloquent manner.”
 Other attractions included a P.K. Nair Symposium on Censorship headed by none other than Shyam Benegal, and a tribute to Adoor Gopalakrishnan who completed 50 years in cinema which included the screening of his latest film Pinneyum and an exhibition in Black-and-White of cartoons and posters marking his chronological journey through filmmaking.
The festival opened with the screening of Navid Mahmoudhi’s debut film Raftan (Parting) about a migrant couple’s tireless efforts to migrate from Iran to Europe. The film was Afghanistan’s submission for the Oscar’s foreign language film category. It is a finely nuanced love story of two youngsters who are trapped in their near-impossible desire to escape from Iran to Turkey but forced to live life in a perpetual state of transit, failing either to get away or to settle down in the city they are living in. 
The highlights of the screening programme were classified into categories. Gender Bender included six films from different countries curated by John Badalu, the operations manager of the Jakarta International Film Festival and the driving force behind the Q! Film Festival that focuses on films representing amorphous identities like Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community (LGBT) and the issues they raise about identity and acceptance.
Migration Films curated by noted festival programmer and film critic Paolo Bertolin had eight chosen films that showcased different areas of human life struggling for survival in a life filled with the flux of uncertainty, geographical displacement, political enforcement, military dictatorship and corruption among other issues. 
Among these, one of the most notable entries was Tamer El Said’s debut fiction film partly rooted in the life of the filmmaker himself. The film, In the Last Days of the City has already bagged the Calgari Film Award and the Award for Best Direction at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2016. Gianfranco Rossi’s Fire At Sea captures the Sicilian island of Lebodosa against the backdrop of the European refugee crisis that won the Golden Bear Award at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival. K.M. Kamal’s I.D. the sole Indian film in this section spells out its mission with the tagline, “Everyone comes from somewhere” that tackles the tragedy of the identity crisis faced by migrant labourers to arrive in Mumbai for survival. Mediterranean directed by Carpignano unfolds the plight of African migrants of Italy. Other films in the section include Mercenaire by Sacha Wolff, Soy Nero by Rafi Pitts, The Road to Mandalay by Midi Z and Sin Nombre by Cary Joji Fukunaga. 
Life of Artists was a wonderful concept that featured films on the lives of six creative men and women, some legendary and some obscure. Bertie Morisot is a film made for French television by Caroline Champetier which talks about the life of a painter and a member of a group of Paris-based painters who later became known as the Impressionists. Camille Claudel, by French filmmaker Bruno Nuytten explores deep into the struggles of the artistic and love life of the French sculptor and graphic artist. Iranian filmmaker Mitra Farahani’s documentary on Bahman Mohassess who is popularly known as the Persian Picasso in the film Fifi Howls from Happiness. Modigliani of Montparnasse is a 1958 film in black-and-white directed by Jacques Becker. A French-Italian fictionalised drama, it was on the last year in the life of Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani who worked and died in abject poverty in Paris. Seraphine, directed by Martin Provost is a simple, subtle and understated true story of the life and art of a simple maid who found her artistic tools in shocking materials like dirt and animal blood. Maurice Pialat’s French film Van Gogh follows the final 67 days of Van Gogh;s life. 
Self-confessed socialist Ken Loach’s latest film he has made at 80 years of age namely I, Daniel Blake, winner of the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes last year. The film follows the signature style of its maker known as the creator of the Cinema of Anger shooting straight as if with a gun. K.S. Sethumadhavan was honoured with an exclusive retrospective of his films known as one of the pioneer “writer’s director’ in Malayalam cinema. However, the packages denied film buffs the choice to pick and choose favourites because there were so many outstanding films that choosing became a major problem.