ITV

Category: DD

  • DD to telecast a rare tale of Indian compassion for Europeans during World War II

    DD to telecast a rare tale of Indian compassion for Europeans during World War II

    NEW DELHI: A Little Poland in India a poignant story of around one thousand orphaned children from Poland, who found a sanctuary in India at the height of Nazi German Dictator Hitler’s atrocities in Poland, will be telecast by Doordarshan tomorrow.

    A Little Poland in India will be officially telecast 10 November at 3:00 pm and on11 November at 7:30 am on DD National and will there after open the inaugural ‘Kinoteka Polish Film Festval’ on18 November at India Habitat Centre.

    The hour-long documentary is the true and captivating story of the then Jam Saheb (Ruler) Digvijaysinhji Ranjitsinhji Jadeja of Nawanagar,nephew of famous Indian cricketer Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji of the Jadeja clan,a princely state in the Kathiawar Peninsula, off the land of Gujarat. It is the heart-warming story of an enriched historical bond between India and Poland. It is a story that represents people-to people contact in its most humane form, beyond borders and across continents.

    During World War II, about 1000 Polish children from war-torn, occupied Poland and Soviet prison camps in Stalin’s Siberia travelled all the way to India, where Jam Saheb took personal risks to make arrangements at a time when the world was at war and India was struggling for its Independence. He built a camp for them in a place called Balachadi beside his summer palace, 25 km from his capitalcity Jamnagar, and made them feel at home.

     

    This is the first film that has been co-produced between the governments of India and Poland under the Audio-Visual agreement between both countries. The co-producers are Doordarshan and the Gujarat Government in India, and the InA (National Audiovisual Institute) and TVP (Telewizja Polska) in Poland.

    Directed by Anuradha and Sumit Osmand Shaw with research by Anuradha herself, the film took the help of historian Dr. Andrzej Krzysztof Kunert, Secretary General of the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites. The Research Coordinators were Kresy-Siberia Foundation and a Balachadi survivor Wieslaw Stypula.  

    The film contains interviews with several survivors, including two children who met in Balachadi but married 78 years later in Poland.

  • DD strengthens its movie library; to screen acclaimed films twice a week

    DD strengthens its movie library; to screen acclaimed films twice a week

    NEW DELHI: The national broadcaster – Doordarshan – is launching a new slot for acclaimed Indian feature films in all languages that have either won national or international honours, featured in the Indian Panorama, or been part of competition sections of 16 renowned international film festivals.

    The films will be screened on Sunday and Monday nights at 11:00 pm from the coming weekend and will be subtitled in English. With revenue earnings of Rs 15 lakh per screening and holding the rights for three years; the pubcaster clarified that the rights were not exclusive.

    In the event of a film being offered for a premiere on DD, the amount to be paid will go up to Rs 25 lakh.

    Doordarshan Director General Tripurari Sharan told indiantelevision.com that the ‘Best of Indian Cinema’ initiative was part of the celebrations on the centenary of Indian cinema.

    Answering a question, he said a similar slot for such films in the eighties and early nineties had fizzled out for various reasons including the fact that the prime time was restricted to around 9:00 pm and viewers generally did not watch television after that. But the entry of the private channels had changed the scenario.

    He claimed that DD was the only channel showing such films. However, Lok Sabha TV also has a similar slot on Sundays, though the window for the kind of films it will take is not as large as the one DD is embarking upon.

    Sharan clarified that as most films had a U/A certification, they could not be shown before 11:00 pm.

    Initially, DD had decided to keep this slot for one year with a total of 104 films. He added that DD had decided to have a cut-off date, and so the slot will only screen films made post the year 2000.

     

    Sharan said that there was need to support these films as they are meant for niche audiences.

    However, this slot will mean that the popular Bioscope slot in which meaningful films are shown in three parts from Monday to Wednesday at 11:00 pm will now be curtailed to Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

    Answering questions at an informal press meet, he said that other time slots could be considered for these films in the event of viewers demand. Furthermore, DD could also consider increasing the frequency of the screening of such films from twice a week to more days. Referring to Sunday afternoons, he added that the slot was already reserved for retrospectives of eminent film personalities.

    On the marketing front, there are already print advertisements that would begin appearing from this weekend, e-flyers to several thousand persons on the list of DD, and social media like Facebook.

    The first four films in this slot are the Malayalam movie Nizhalkkuthu by the famed Adoor Gopalakrishnan on 10 November, the Marathi drama Deeol by Umesh Kulkarni on 11 November, the Konkani film Digant by Dyanesh Moghe on 17 November, and the Bangla Nisshabd by Jahar Kanungo on 18 November.

  • DD to telecast live launch of Mangalyaan Mission from Sriharikota

    DD to telecast live launch of Mangalyaan Mission from Sriharikota

    NEW DELHI: Doordarshan will telecast live the launch of the India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) – which will conduct a detailed study of the Martian atmosphere and is the nation’s first ever mission to the Red Planet.

    The telecast PSLV – C25/Mars Orbiter Mission will be telecast live on DD National from 1410 hrs from Sriharikota today afternoon. Prior to that, there will be a ten-minute curtain-raiser on the mission.

    The countdown commenced on 3 November in the morning at 6.06 hrs, according to an official statement from the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).

    India would become only the fourth nation or entity from Earth to survey Mars up close with spacecraft, following the Soviet Union, the United States and the European Space Agency (ESA). Past attempts to reach the Red Planet from both China and Japan have failed.

    MOM is the first of two new Mars orbiter science probes from Earth set to blast off for the Red Planet this November. Half a globe away, NASA’s MAVEN orbiter remains on target to launch barely two weeks after MOM on 18 November from the Florida Space Coast.

     

    MOM is on schedule to lift off atop the powerful, extended XL version of India’s highly reliable four stage Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C25).

    The 44 meter (144 ft) PSLV will launch MOM into an initially elliptical Earth parking orbit of 248 km x 23,500 km. A series of six orbit raising burns will eventually dispatch MOM on a trajectory to Mars around 1 December.

    Following a 300 day interplanetary cruise phase, the do or die Mars orbital insertion engine will fire on 21 September 2014 and place MOM into an 366 km x 80,000 km elliptical orbit.

    MOM arrives about the same time as NASA’s MAVEN orbiter. They will significantly bolster Earth’s armada of five operational orbiters and surface rovers currently investigating the Red Planet.

    MAVEN and MOM will “work together” to help solve the mysteries of Mars atmosphere, the Chief Bruce Jakosky of MAVEN told Universe Today. Although there are no NASA instruments on board MOM, NASA is providing key communications and navigation support to ISRO and MOM through the agency’s trio of huge tracking antennas in the Deep Space Network (DSN).

    The $ 69 million 1,350 kilogram MOM orbiter, also known as ‘Mangalyaan’, is the brainchild of ISRO.

    ‘Mangalyaan’ is outfitted with an array of five indigenous science instruments including a multi colour imager and a methane gas sniffer to study the Red Planet’s atmosphere, morphology, mineralogy and surface features. Methane on Earth originates from both biological and geological sources.