101 days long Soorya Festival

The 101 days long arts festival with films, music, dance and videos - Soorya Festival - will begin at Thiruvananthapuram on September 21. From this year onwards, the festival will be held in 10 more districts in the State, besides Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai and New Delhi.

Industrialist and NRI Ravi Pillai will inaugurate the festival at Tagore Theatre. It will begin with a special show by National Award winning contemporary dance troupe Samudra, followed by the world premier of Priyadarshan's Tamil film Kanchipuram. Tagore theatre, Co-operative Bank auditorium, Kalabhavan and Vyloppilly Samskrithi Bhavan are the main venues of the festival.

More than 1,000 artistes from all over the country are expected to take part in the festival. Veteran artistes, including Padma Subramaniam, K.J. Yesudas, Shobhana, Priyadarshini Govind, Bombay Jayasree and T.M. Krishna will grace the Soorya Dance and Music festival to be held from October 1 to 10.

A new event to be featured this year is 'Jalsa Ghar', which includes 10 chamber music concerts. Ramesh Narayan, Gayathri, Sreenivasan, Kudamaloor Janardhanan, Athira Kodamballi and Prince Ravi Varma will take part in Jalsa Ghar to be held from November 11 to 20 at the Swathi Tirunal School of Music.

Adoor Gopalakrishnan's Naalu Penungal, Shyamaprasad's Ore Kadal, Pakistani film Khuda Ke Liye, Chak De India, Taare Zameen Par, Sarkar Raj and Jodha Akbar will be screened from September 21 to 30.

The cultural fest will end on December 31 featuring a specially designed programme, 'Tharangam', by singer M.G. Sreekumar, G. Venugopal, Ramesh Narayanan and Vidhu Prathap. The fete is dedicated to celebrated playwright K.T. Mohammed, who passed away earlier this year.