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After two years, the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) is back, in its 33rd edition, but not, we are sorry to report, new and improved. Invitees will be staying at the Capital's Ashok Hotel, which has defied all attempts to sell it. Audiences will be battling natural bureaucratic reticence to share information about movies. And filmmakers and stars will, by all accounts, be putting in only fleeting appearances.

Hollywood eye candy and Austin Powers' favourite blonde Heather Graham certainly won't be one of them. Paramount had offered to fly down Graham and co-star Jimi Mistry for the premiere of The Guru, which is being commercially released in India in November. Sorry, sex comedy, said the organisers, the Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF). We will not be amused.

A.R. Rahman was the next choice. In a year when the Bombay Dreams man has been our premier cultural export, his performance would have been an ideal kick-starter to the festival beginning on October 1. At Rs 25 lakh, it turned out to be too expensive.

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Er, maybe, Jean-Luc Godard. After all, the IFFI is giving him a Lifetime Achievement Award. He doesn't travel much, was the polite reply from his agent. No show, again.

So here we are, with an IFFI where any success will be an entirely unintended consequence of penny-pinching and foot-dragging.

At Rs 1.5 crore from the DFF and Rs 1.25 crore from the Delhi Government, who will the IFFI be for? Well, Information and Broadcasting Minister Sushma Swaraj managed to save it from the Geethakrishnan Committee axe (the 2000 report recommendation that the DFF was superfluous was accepted by the Finance Ministry) and has tried to give it a new vision.

There is a film bazaar, the first time the ministry is organising a market where at least 15 sellers (from YashRaj Films to Ramoji Rao's Film City) and an unspecified number of buyers (from non-diaspora markets such as China and South Africa) will, well, buy and sell movies.

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And there is the Indian Panorama, where some fine filmmakers will be showcased, from Mani Ratnam (Kannathil Muthamittal) to Buddhadeb Dasgupta (Manda Meyer Upakhyan). Where are Aparna Sen's Mr and Mrs Iyer and Adoor Gopalakrishnan's Nizalkuth, two of the best films made this year? For various bureaucratic reasons, you can watch them only at the next festival, or better still at a foreign festival.

Don't expect controversy. Digvijay Singh's Maya, which stirred trouble at the last Toronto Film Festival with its theme-the ritual sexual abuse of young girls in urban India, which Singh insists is widespread-has stayed away. So has Shekhar Kapur's The Four Feathers, whose existence the DFF discovered only when the Toronto festival was going on earlier in the month. Just as well, given the lacerating reviews it has got from Hollywood's press.

So what do we have to look forward to? No, not Krzysztof Zanussi, who is coming for the umpteenth time with his new film, Life as Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease. Rather, a six-film retrospective from Cahiers du Cinema, France's premier cinema magazine which is celebrating 50 years. A 10-film tribute to Marcello Mastroianni. At least a few high-powered parties, from Swaraj and Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit. And the movies that Cannes selector Christian Jeune may pick up for his film festival next year.

And also, perhaps, a better-organised, more inclusive festival next time, with a budget upwards of Rs 4 crore, not the dying gasp of a socialist state.