ITV

Category: Hindi

  • Training programme for screenplay writers, finalists to pitch for film projects in Mumbai

    Training programme for screenplay writers, finalists to pitch for film projects in Mumbai

    NEW DELHI: After its three-year association with the Sundance Institute for the Mumbai Mantra – Sundance Screenwriters’ Lab has come to an end; Mumbai Mantra has now launched ‘The Mumbai Mantra CineRise Screenwriting Programme’, an 8-step lab for screenwriters.

     

    In the first stage of submission, screenwriters need to submit a story on which the script will be based, in six to eight pages. This will be followed by the writer’s statement in just two pages outlining details of the project is about. Thirdly, the writer’s biodata will also have to be submitted with contact details.

     

    Among the submitted applications, 100 stories will be selected for a two day screenwriting workshop which will be held in different cities across India. The finalists will have intensive interactions with experienced writers and directors at the workshop. The selected participants can choose the center closest to their homes.

     

    After the workshop, the screenwriters will have two months to submit the first draft of their screenplays.

     

    After intensive evaluation, twelve to fifteen or more deserving screenplays will be shortlisted for the final selection. These screenplays will be sent to the mentors and other experts, for detailed evaluation and notes.

     

    The finalists will have intensive interactions with experienced writers and directors at the workshop. The selected participants can choose the center closest to their homes. The convenor for this programme will be Anjum Rajabali.

     

    After receiving notes from the mentors, the writers will have one more month to send in the second drafts of their screenplays. The finalists will be invited to a five-day workshop at a resort destination with renowned writers and directors to help them revise their screenplays and then get them ready for a pitch event in Mumbai with studio heads, independent producers, directors, financiers, distributors, film festival directors and curators.

     

    Aspiring script-writers for films can apply till 20 August for the ‘The Mumbai Mantra CineRise Screenwriting Programme’.

  • Open Frame to focus on documentary and film appreciation workshops

    Open Frame to focus on documentary and film appreciation workshops

    NEW DELHI: Open Frame, the annual festival of short films and documentaries, will conduct several workshops this year instead of showcasing films.  

     

    Organised by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT), the festival will be held at the India International Centre in Delhi from 26 August 26 to 2 September.

     

    The first workshop is on ‘Documentary: History and Art’ by former National Film Archives of India director professor Suresh Chhabria. The Workshop will examine some basic principles of documentary filmmaking.  Among its various functions have been those of exploration, advocacy, promotion, self-reflexivity and political activism.

     

    The workshops also include ‘Documentary Film Appreciation’ by Ajit Duara on 27 August. The idea of this workshop is to demonstrate that the development of an interesting film narrative is the variable that distinguishes a stylistically evolved director. Duara has been a film critic for a number of publications over the years and presently reviews for Open Magazine.

     

    PSBT is a non-governmental, not-for-profit trust with the mission to create and sustain a credible space for public service broadcasting in India which is independent, participatory, pluralistic and democratic, distanced from commercial imperatives and state/ political pressures. It’s objective is to mainstream the Indian documentary segment and empower independent filmmakers by commissioning and mentoring films from across the country.

  • Singham Returns…Half a Singham!

    Singham Returns…Half a Singham!

    MUMBAI: Sequels are usually a means of using the brand equity of the title of a successful film. Singham Returns is one more such example. Ajay Devgn is still a cop who can fell half a dozen goons with one blow. Well, he has to, since the goons come in droves of fifty or more. But while that remains the same, the rest has changed because most Hindi filmmakers take the audience for granted while making a sequel.

    Devgn, a defiant and honest cop, who has been transferred to Mumbai from his Goa post in Singham (while in reality, such cops are transferred out of Mumbai!). Since he is Singham, he remains constant, while all including the villains as well as his wife to be too (!) have changed. Actually, the film has no space for a female lead but that would be a great risk according to Indian films’ unwritten regulations.

    Devgn is in comfortable company. His school teacher, Anupam Kher, leads a ruling political party, albeit in keeping with the recent trend of a coalition with another party. Kher’s party has Mahesh Manjrekar as the CM while his coalition partner is Zakir Hussain, whose strings are pulled by a swami, Aloke Gupte. Being Guru Kher’s disciple, Manjrekar and Devgn are both on the right side of the law while Hussain, under the auspice of the swami, is corruption personified and, obviously, possesses a criminal mind-set. It is a formula that has been working for decades; a swami and a seedy politician have always made a great combination for villainy.

    As things go, Devgn has the backing of all concerned: his school senior, the CM Manjrekar; their common school guru Kher; the police commissioner, Sharat Saxena; as well as the all of 40,000 odd cops of Mumbai!

    Everybody knows that the villains are Gupte and Hussain but the law needs proof. That is what the whole film is about. 142 minutes of finding proof against two not-so-sinister or convincing villains, Hussain and Gupte. So, finally, the film amounts to one-upmanship between the villains and Devgn. It goes on and on as the judiciary needs proof and police being what it is supposed to be, can’t protect its only witness. The villains win all the way until, finally, the law keepers become outlaws to liquidate the villains. They march in their sponsored banians to the villains den in just about the most clap trap scene in the film.

    The problem with Singham Returns is that it is an oft repeated story about a swami and a corrupt politician pitted against an honest establishment represented by a cop. What is more, it is poorly scripted. The film starts with the super cop, Devgn and a youth brigade riding fast bikes. That is rather tame. The script is so predictable, it could be any honest cop vs corrupt politician. Rohit Shetty’s direction without his blowing up cars does not amount to much really. The film has four music directors and eight lyricists on it credits but no song worth a mention!  Dialogue is okay at times. While the film needs some more trimming, the positive factor is its photography, especially aerial shots of Mumbai.

    As for performances, nobody really needs to act in this film. Devgn with his puffed up cheeks does what he does on regular basis: throw punches. Kareena Kapoor has no role really and just pouts her way through. Kher is his usual self. While Gupte overacts as the swami, Hussain is the only one who is convincing. Dayanand Shetty, the Daya of the TV serial CID does what he does in the serial; act as a mighty cop and breaks down doors; he is effective. Rest in the cast are incidental.

    On the whole, Singham Returns is a high priced routine film with only salvation being its four day weekend starting with the Independence Day holiday on Friday and ending with the Janmashtami holiday on Monday. Much appreciated earlier version, Singham, had barely managed to make it to 100 crore mark. While this film needs to do twice as much, it will fall much short of that mark.

  • Kerala festival head steps down in protest

    Kerala festival head steps down in protest

    NEW DELHI: Bina Paul, who heads the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) as the artistic director for 12 years, has resigned as she feels the festival now concentrates more on individual personalities.

     

    Her last assignment has been the recent International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK).

     

    She said the festival is less about team work and her work, which she had done with passion, had become “more like an event management job, and I am not an event manager.” She added in a statement that “a festival needs to be reinvented with time. We needed to re-think the festival through but that was not happening which I found very upsetting.”

     

    Paul, a national-award winning film editor and alumnus of the Film and TV Institute of India (FTII), is reportedly joining the newly set up Trivandrum campus of LV Prasad Film & TV Academy as the director.

     

    The 19th International Film Festival of Kerala is scheduled to take place from 12 to 19 December.

  • Indian film on youth theme closes Rhode Film Festival

    Indian film on youth theme closes Rhode Film Festival

    NEW DELHI: The debut film by Agneya, ‘M Cream’, was the closing film of the 18th Rhode Island International Film Festival over the weekend, marking its world premiere.

     

    Shot in New Delhi and Himachal Pradesh, ‘M Cream’, features Imaad Shah, Ira Dubey, Tom Alter, Barry John and Auritra Ghosh. ‘M Cream’ revolves around “a motley crew of university students, who set out on a journey in the pursuit of a mythical form of hashish, confronting a series of encounters that begin to unravel the myriad realities of rebellion.”

     

    The Festival held from 5 to 10 August also screen ‘Points of Origin’, a short film directed by Anya Leta from India, which explores the emotional conflicts of an American couple while attempting to have a baby with a surrogate mother in India.

     

    ‘Global Village’ (India/USA), a short documentary by Ezra Millstein, about two families from India and the United States, who work together to help build a new Habitat for Humanity home, will also be screened at the festival.

  • ‘Kick’ continues successful run at BO

    ‘Kick’ continues successful run at BO

    MUMBAI: Entertainment, which opened to rather tepid response, continued to remain so; the film’s mouth publicity reports were not very complementary either. There was little raise over the Friday collections on Saturday.

     

    However, the film has been able to manage a not so encouraging Rs 30.9 crore. The film showed little improvement on Saturday but did better on Sunday improving by about 25 per cent over its Friday figures. Next weekend offers four holidays with Independence Day on Friday and Gokul Ashtami on Monday but that benefit won’t be available so much to this film as theatre chains are blocked for the release of Singham Returns. 

     

    Lateef The King Of Crime is a disaster.

     

    Kick has maintained excellent collections in its second week cashing in on open run and the aftermath of Eid. The film crossed the Rs 200 crore mark on its eleventh day and ended the second week with Rs 49.1 crore thus taking its two week total to Rs 213.05 crore.

     

    Hate Story 2 comes to the end of its run with adding Rs 20 lakh in its third week and taking its three week total to Rs 35.8 crore.

     

    Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania has collected Rs 1.20 crore in its fourth week taking its four week total to a healthy Rs 76.4 crore.

     

    Ek Villain has added 10 lakh in its sixth week to take its six week total to Rs 102.97 crore.

  • ‘Happy New Year’ trailer to be on Whatsapp

    ‘Happy New Year’ trailer to be on Whatsapp

    MUMBAI: In keeping with the tradition of innovatively marketing its films, Red Chillies Entertainments yet again comes out with a unique way to promote its movie ‘Happy New Year.’

     

    For the first time an Indian film will send its trailer via WhatsApp to the users of the application. Simply by giving a missed call or dropping in a WhatsApp message at +91 9819020202, the audiences will get the trailer on their mobiles and tablets. Also, the restriction by WhatsApp on a broadcast message has specially been removed for this campaign. 

     

    Talking on the first-of-its-kind trailer release, Red Chillies Entertainment CEO Venky Mysore said, “As a company there is a special focus on constantly improving fan experience through innovation. Whether it was the first look of the movie at the beginning of the year through one of the biggest Twitter innovations with fans receiving customised posters from their favourite artists, which received close to a billion impressions as a campaign, or the new innovations with WhatsApp and Twitter for the upcoming movie – ‘Happy New Year’, our endeavour is to delight fans.”

     

    “With over 50 million active users on WhatsApp in India who every day share millions of videos and images with individual friends and groups it was an obvious choice to use WhatsApp as a platform. The only challenge was the restriction by WhatsApp where a broadcast message cannot be sent to more than 250 friends/WhatsApp users but WhatsApp has specially removed this restriction for this campaign,” Mysore added.

     

    Directed by Farah Khan, the eagerly-awaited ‘Happy New Year’ brings back Deepika Padukone and Shah Rukh Khan together, after their last blockbuster `Chennai Express.’ The movie also stars Abhishek Bachchan, Sonu Sood, Vivaan Shah and Boman Irani and has been shot in Dubai. The trailer is scheduled to release on 14 August 2014, on the eve of Independence Day.

     

    The film is produced by Red Chillies Entertainments and distributed by Yash Raj Films worldwide. The film will release this Diwali in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu languages across the globe.

  • Entries invited for NFDC script lab and We Care Film Fest

    Entries invited for NFDC script lab and We Care Film Fest

    NEW DELHI: Entries have been invited by the National Film Development Corporation for its script lab and by several Indian film festivals for entries in their respective events being held both this year and the next year.

     

    In its second year, the National script Lab is a long-running script development lab for Indian writers wanting to build and develop screenplays with three residential workshops over five months supported by interim feedback and work via Skype.

     

    Internationally acclaimed mentors will help up to nine selected writers through carefully staged development to prepare their scripts for introduction to the market in India and the rest of the world for financing and co-production.

     

     This year the special focus is on children and youth films. However, the lab will offer places to all genres of film, not exclusively to just children and youth screenplays. Entries with an application fee of Rs 2000 have to be sent by 1 September. Complete applications are to be sent to labs@nfdcindia.com with the first 20 pages of the script along with the application form.

     

    Meanwhile, the country’s first film festival on disability recognized by the United Nations; the We Care Film Fest has invited entries of short films and documentaries in four categories: up to one minute, five minutes, 30 and 60 minutes respectively from across the globe on various disability issues.

     

     The festival is also organising a conference, which will be held from 24 to 26 November, at the Vigyan Bhavan in New Delhi.

     

    The event is being organised jointly by UNESCO, the UN Information Centre for India and Bhutan, the Department of Disability Affairs, the Social Justice and Empowerment Ministry, the National Trust, the NGO Brotherhood and the We Care film fest.

     

     The screening of short films and documentaries will follow panel discussion, sharing of success stories by using audio-visual as information, communication and advocacy tools.  Though, the last date of submission of short films and documentaries for the We Care Film Fest is 12 December, films received till 31 October on the theme of the conference and on other disability issues will be screened during the conference. The preview committee will select the short films and documentaries for screening.

     

     The third Delhi International Film Festival being held from 20 to 27 December has called for entries by 30 September for full length feature, short films, NRI films, green films (environmental and wild life), student films, animation films, and documentaries. The festival will be held in collaboration with the New Delhi Municipal Committee and Delhi Tourism in Delhi. Details are available on info@delhiinternationalfilmfestival.com and the website: www.delhiinternationalfilmfestival.com

     

    Meanwhile, the Centre for Media Studies Environment has called for entries to its annual eighth edition of CMS Vatavaran: Environment and Wildlife Film Festival and Forum. Films produced on or after 1 January 2015 are accepted in the CMS VATAVARAN 2015 film festival scheduled from 9 to 12 October 2015 at New Delhi. The entry form and guidelines can be downloaded from our website www.cmsvatavaran.org.

  • ‘Entertainment’…This one is for kids and likeminded!

    ‘Entertainment’…This one is for kids and likeminded!

    MUMBAI: A dog rates as the most accepted and loved pet anywhere and everywhere. They are easily adaptable to training and loyal as companions. The pet and the owner have a tendency to get emotionally attached to each other, so much so that fortunes are sometimes willed to a pet on the owner’s death. 

    Dogs are often used in films too, usually with the aim to entertain children or, otherwise, to solve mysteries. Entertainment seems to have been inspired from an American film, Bailey’s Billion$, a children’s film about a pet dog inheriting a billion dollar and the deceased’s nephew and spouse wanting to eliminate him for the billion to pass on to them.

    Akshay Kumar is a devoted son who has no regular job. To tend to his ailing father lying in hospital, he keeps doing various odd jobs every day. Every time he does an odd job, he is shortchanged but he avoids getting into a fight as his priority is to run to hospital to check on his father, Darshan Jariwal.

    On one such visit to the hospital with his friend to check on his father, he learns that Jariwala is not sick at all and just exploiting Akshay to enjoy the luxury of the five-star hospital and is romancing a nurse. When confronted, Jariwala reveals that Akshay is not his son but he adopted him after a train accident in which his mother had died and the compensation to her close relatives was Rs one lakh which he wanted to claim. Akshay is actually the son of a wealthy jeweller (played by Dalip Tahil as a photo frame) from Bangkok who sired him and later betrayed his mother.

    Producers: Ramesh S Taurani, Jayantilal Gada.

    Directors: Sajid-Farhad.

    Cast: Akshay Kumar, Tamannaah ,MIthun Chakraborty, Johny Liver, Prakash Raj, Sonu Sood, Krishna Abhishek, Darshan Jariwala and, in cameo, Riteish Deshmukh.

    Just when Akshay learns of this history about his family, he happens to watch a TV news bulletin and learns that his biological father has passed away. Akshay is thrilled and decides to go to Bangkok along with his sidekick, Krishna, to claim his father’s fortune. On his arrival at his late father’s palatial mansion, he meets Johny Lever, the family lawyer and executor of the will. Lever does not take much convincing to accept Akshay as the jeweller’s son. However, Akshay can’t inherit the Rs 3000 crore fortune since his dead father has bestowed all of it to his pet dog named Entertainment!

    Akshay thinks nothing of it and decides that all he has to do is to get rid of the pet and, as the son of the deceased Tahil, he will be the next heir. Meanwhile, two jailbirds, Prakash Raj and Sonu Sood, also claimants to Tahil’s fortune, are just out and proceed to claim it. But they realise that there are two other heirs before them, a dog and Akshay. They realise that Akshy plans to kill the dog so all they have to do is wait till that happens after which they can kill Akshay.

    This is one smart dog who has saved Tahil from Prakash and Sood and outsmarts Akshay every time he tries to kill him. On one such attempt to kill the pet, it is Akshay whose life is in danger; the pet saves him. Akshay has a change of heart. Now he accepts the pet as the true inheritor of Tahil’s fortune and decides to leave Bangkok. But, not for long since he knows that the pet’s life is in danger.

    Now the battle of wits is between Akshay, Krishna and the pet on one side and Sood and Prakash on the other.

    Since this is supposed to be a light entertainer, aiming more towards kids, wittingly or unwittingly, the treatment is of the sort one would find in the Hollywood hit Home Alone. Not only the theme but also a lot of things are borrowed from earlier films: the pet’s tricks for instance are sourced from the movie Kung Fu Hustle and Akshay describing ghosts to Prakash and Sood is from Mahmood’s famous scene from classic hit, Pyar Kiye Jaa. Little is original—except for the best part of the film, which is Krishna’s linking and rhyming various film titles to convey whatever he wants; that is funny.  Songs are pleasant and peppy but used randomly whatever the situation. While their direction is okay with ample help from other sources, dialogue on which Sajid and Farhad have built their career is a notch below their standard except for Krishna’s lines. The second half needed some trimming.

    While the dog Junior is expectedly the mainstay of the film, Krishna and Johny Lever’s parts add to the fun quotient. Akshay is his normal self: funny at times, almost so at others. Prakash and Sood as blundering villains are apt for a film aimed at children. Tamannaah is kept away for most of the first half while she does get due exposure in the latter part.

    Entertainment is a fairly amusing film which the children will enjoy. However, with cinema chains blocked for the next week’s release, Singham Returns, this film has limited time to recover whatever it can.

  • ‘Katiyabaaz’ to release in 15 Indian cities on 22 August

    ‘Katiyabaaz’ to release in 15 Indian cities on 22 August

    NEW DELHI: ‘Katiyabaaz’, a documentary by Fahad Mustafa and Deepti Kakkar which has already won several awards in India and overseas, is being released in around 45 screens on 22 August.

     

    The film is being presented by Phantom Films owned by Vikramaditya Motwane, Anurag Kashyap, Madhu Mantena and Vikas Bahl.

     

    It will initially be released in 15 cities including Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Pune, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Indore, Kanpur, Chandigarh and Jaipur.

     

    The film revolves around Loha Singh, a nimble young electrician who provides Robin Hood style services to the poor in a city with 15-hour power cuts. But he has to face the first female chief of the electricity supply company who is on a mission to dismantle the illegal connections for good.

     

    ‘Katiyabaaz’ won the 61st National Award for Best Investigative Film. It has been shown at several international film festivals including Berlinale, Tribeca and CPH:DOX.

     

    It won the Jury award at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles early this year and the Best Film (Golden Gateway award) in the India Gold Category at the Mumbai Film Festival last year.