The awards were first given in 1953 as the
Filmfare Awards and initially only the Hindi film industry was recognized. In 1963, the Awards were extended to Best Picture in Telugu, Tamil, Bengali and Marathi film industries. Special categories for Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress were introduced from 1974. But for unknown reasons, the
Filmfare Awards Bangla segment was discontinued after 1985. Later in 2014, after almost 3 decades, this award segment was revived and rebranded as the "Filmfare Awards East". That year onwards, separate categories for the other Special Awards were introduced. On 8 March 2014, in a press conference held at
Kolkata, the Worldwide Media Group announced that Filmfare Award is debuting in
Eastern India named as "Filmfare Awards East" to honour the best cinematic artistic talents of the region. In the inaugural installment, it was declared that awards in 29 categories would be given away at the
Science City auditorium, Kolkata on 29 March 2014. The awards would include 21 trophies for Bengali movies and four each for
Odia and
Assamese films. The four categories for both Odia and Assamese films were Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress. The winners were selected from 102 entries in Bengali films, 36 and 14 entries respectively from the Odia and Assamese films. The Award ceremony was again briefly discontinued and not hosted in 2015 and 2016 due to the unequal representation and award distribution among the three film industries. From 2017 the award is given only to
Bengali film industry. No awards were given in 2019 and 2020 owing to the then ongoing
COVID-19 pandemic. 2021 onwards, the award was once again rebranded as the "Filmfare Awards Bangla" and is given only to the Bengali film industry. == The Red Carpet ==