The curtain of the 10-day event goes up on November 23 with screening of the Spanish film Volver directed by Pedro Almodovar and starring Penelope Cruz.

Bangladeshi director Abu Sayeed's Nirontor starring Shabnoor and Ilias Kanchan, is vying for an award in the Asian-African-Latin American competitive section, at the film festival.

Nirontor, which also has Jayanta Chattopadhyay, Amirul Huq Chowdhury and Dolly Zahur in the cast, is a story of a lower middle class family living in the outskirts of Dhaka, struggling financially and the plight of the daughter (played by Shabnoor) who is the sole earner through prostitution.

Nirontor has already been hailed as a "non-judgmental" film and is tipped among the favourites to win an honour in the festival.

But Sayeed's film will have to contend against movies like Aviva, My Love from Israel, which had won the best screenplay award at the Jerusalem Festival this year.

A five-member international jury will judge the films in the competitive section.

More than 100 films from across the world will be showcased in the festival along with several Indian entries in Hindi and other regional language.

Veteran actor Shashi Kapoor will inaugurate the festival, which has as its theme "The Whole World is One Family", symbolising the spirit of IFFI as being a melting pot of cinema from across the world and India.

The event will feature a special retrospective of Prithivraj Kapoor's films and witness a special screening of Sir Richard Attenborough's highly acclaimed movie Gandhi to mark the centenary of the Satyagraha movement launched by Mahatma Gandhi.

The focus of the 11-day festival will be films made in regional languages in India, which reflect the cultural diversity of India.

A great attraction of the festival will be the Cinema of the World section where films from about 40 countries will be shown including some award-winning ones.

A novel feature will be mobile vans that will take the films to remotest parts of Goa to ensure larger participation.

There will also be usual world premiers, film bazaars, music concerts, children's workshops and street animation.

The festival will end with the screening of Mexican film Babel directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

There is considerable interest about Almodovar's Volver since its director had won critical acclaim for films including Bad Education and Talk to Her. He had previously worked with Penelope Cruz in All About My Mother in 1999.

The IFFI, which until 2003 had been held in different cities of India, was shifted to Goa as a permanent venue. The aim was to emulate events like France's prestigious Cannes Film Festival in a bid to reach a larger global audience by mixing tourism and cinema.

November is the month when Goa attracts a large number of tourists especially from Europe and the US who find palm tree-lined beaches, vibrant music and dance-loving people of Goa, breathtaking.