In a major recognition to famed director Adoor Gopalakrishnan, his Indo-French co-production NIZHALKKUTHU (Shadow Kill) will be the inaugural film at the 13th edition of the Fukuoka International Film Festival (Japan), which is to open on September 12.

Fukuoka will be the 27th festival in which NIZHALKKUTHU, a life story of a hangman of the 1940s, is participating, Adoor Gopalakrishnan said in statement on Monday (August 4, 2003).

Intimating the decision of the festival management to bestow this special honour on the film, Festival Director Tadao Sato said it was the original and superb cinematic qualities of the film that prompted the decision.

Adoor Gopalakrishnan and the lead player Oduvil Unnikrishnan have been invited to be the guests of honour at the festival. The two would address a press conference on September 12 and then present the film at the screenings. There would be post-screening discussions with the audience at three of the four screenings on September 12, 14 and 19.

The film is currently being shown in the Brisbane film festival in Australia after Sydney and Melbourne. Released in Kerala last week, NIZHALKKUTHU, which received the national award for the best Malayalam film, is receiving enthusiastic response from the audience.

Adoor Gopalakrishnan took six years for the preparation of the film that explores the moral turmoil plaguing an official State executioner on the eve of a hanging. Though the story initially unfolds with a grim, measured solemnity, he masterfully redirects the plot, allowing an oblique tale of romance between an orphan boy and a young girl to gradually reveal itself as the central argument on the ethics of capital punishment.