For a country producing the highest number of films in the world, India is aggressively looking to market its movies more widely across the globe.

The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), one of the driving forces in re-launching the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) through a Cannes-like event in Goa, is working to make this happen at the latest festival that opens here Monday evening.

Organisers of IFFI, eager to make their event a success, claimed a "film bazaar" was being held for the first time ever on this scale and size.

The film bazaar is part of CII's initiative to "develop and globalise" the Indian entertainment industry.

India is a major regional centre for cinema and its film industry is the world's largest, with over 1,200 movies released in 2002 alone.

Though supported largely by the vast film-going Indian public, recent trends are showing increasing popularity of Indian films abroad, especially in countries with large expatriate Indian populations.

Industry lobby-group CII is launching the Nov 30-Dec 8 film bazaar along with the information and broadcasting ministry, and the government's promotion network, the National Films Development Corporation (NFDC), apart from support from the government of host state Goa.

Goa itself does not have much of a film culture, but has invested heavily in IFFI, in part to boost its image and possibly gain from the fallout for a state that has been long promoting itself as a destination for in-bound tourism.

CII said the event would provide space for "negotiations between the filmmaker and the financier", not just for domestic players.

"Co-productions, joint-creative endeavours, sharing of technology take centre stage and superficial differences fade away," said the promoters, explaining what they anticipated from the event. Indian films are seen by analysts to be facing changing, if not trying, times. Between the 1950s and 1990s, many locally produced movies made profits, with little competition from TV or imported movies. But of late, TV and cable channels, movie imports and rampant "piracy" are problems seen to lead to many Indian films turning into commercial failures.

Major Indian languages have their own film industries -- in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada.

Indian commercial films are showing signs of undergoing changes from their long, three-hour format often marked by musical and action-oriented themes that are melodramatic or sentimental and interrupted by song-and-dance routines.

Some quarters see independent films as the future of cinema in India, in a country where direct government patronage of the medium has largely declined.

CII says India's recent multiplex expansion and the "mushrooming of fiercely active film-societies and film-making courses" have created a "new generation of producers, directors, editors, actors and distributors".

Organisers of the film bazaar expect film-brokers and production house representatives keen on joint ventures, including from countries like Britain, the US, Romania, Brazil, Mauritius, France and Sri Lanka.

Also planned is a conference on the "globalisation of the Indian entertainment industry".

They also expect representatives of other international film festivals held across the Indian subcontinent to attend "to assimilate the economics that drive film-making in the region".

South Asia, the organisers say, offers relatively lower shooting costs, affordable state-of-the-art post-production facilities and picturesque locales.

Exhibitors at the event include Sahara India Parivar, the government-owned Prasar Bharti Corporation, Satellite Media Group, Andhra Pradesh-based Ramoji Rao Film City, UTV, Adlabs, Indian Film Exporters Association, Mukta Arts, the government's Films Division, Children's Film Society and Mauritius Film Development Corporation.