Thiruvananthapuram, Friday18 December 2009: As the 14th International film festival is coming to a close within a matter of hours, the polling for the audience prize began at Thursday noon. Film-maker Manik Chakravarthy was the first person to vote. Panniyan Ravindran also exercised his franchise.

The audience prize is given to the most popular film in the competition section that has a total of 14 films from different Afro-Asian, Southeast Asian and Latin American countries.

The penultimate day of the festival saw films such as ‘Nothing Personal’ from Netherlands, ‘Whisper with the wind’ from Iraq, ‘Love Life of a gentle Coward’ from Croatia and ‘The Fish Child’ from Argentina stealing the show.

While the carnival is to end in a day, the IFFK-2009 has been an eye-opener to the deceiving ways of the film-makers, who take their audiences through reality and fantasy, sometimes a mix of both that the viewers end up confused as to where they were.

And the film-makers like Kim Ki Duk, Penek Retnauruang and Lars Von Trier, just to name a few, seems to enjoy the different perceptions given to their films.

There are also film-makers like Anurag Kashyap, who at times take the cast through a ride to finally get what he has in mind. Opening up in a talk at the Hotel Horizon here on Thursday, Anurag explained about how he would place cameras in front of an actor, but actually shoot from another that was kept way far from the actors. On a lighter vein, he said that he had a serious allergy to love songs in Hindi movies and self-pity.