Category: Hindi

MUMBAI: Producer Vashu Bhagnani has taken a liking for the electronic media. After releasing the music of his forthcoming film F.A.L.T.U. on pen drive, Bhagnai has developed a whole new platform to release Indian films.

Trying a new kind of distribution model, he will also be releasing his film on the Internet besides the theatres. By releasing his next film on the Internet, it looks like he will be paving the path for futuristic film releases.

As per Bhagnani, Indians staying overseas pay hefty sums to watch a film while here in India, a ticket costs a mere Rs 150. According to the producer, Indians in the US pay around $12 to watch a film, which in Indian terms would amount to around Rs 500 per ticket.

This is why he decided to give them the same viewing experience while keeping the cost the same as that they would normally pay in India. “Hence, we have kept the price of the video stream at $2.89,” he avers.

Bhagnani plans to release the film online in the UAE, UK and India.
 

MUMBAI: To showcase the best of Indian cinema, the Indian Film Festival: Bollywood and Beyond will be held in Sydney this month.

The festival will feature more than 30 films including 15 Australian premieres.

Festival director Mitu Bhowmick Lange said that the inaugural event was a huge success. “Not only was it a super success promotionally but it was also very rewarding for us too,” she said.

The organisers expect this year’s Indian cinema celebration to be even better.

No One Killed Jessica and the long anticipated sequel to the loved indie smash East is East, namely West is West will premiere. The Saman Khan hit Dabaang will also be screened at the festival. “Each of the films is different. We have got so much going on. There is something for everyone,” Lange further said.

Guests of mention who would be attending the festival include Vidya Balan, Malaika Arora Khan and Pakistan actor Ali Zafar among others.

The festival was launched last year to foster greater understanding and collaboration between the Australian and Indian film industries.
 

MUMBAI: Dr Biju Kumar’s latest Malayalam film Veettilekkulla Vazhi (The Way Home) has been selected to feature in the Competition Section of the 10th Imagine India International film festival scheduled to be held at Madrid, Spain, from 17 to 31 May.

The film concerns a doctor who sees his wife and five-year-old son die in an explosion at a market in Delhi. Now working at a Prison Hospital, he is assigned the case of a woman in critical condition, a surviving suicide bomber from the ‘Indian Jihadi’ terrorist group. Despite his efforts, the woman dies. But before dying, she entrusts him to find her five-year-old son and unite him with his father Abdul Zuban Tariq, head of the terrorist group. What forms next is what the film is all about.

The film has already been screened in five international film festivals including the Cairo and Mumbai fest. It bagged the Netpac award for best film in the IFFK,last year.

The film will release in India in April.
 

MUMBAI: Chetan Desai, known for his 3D animation film Ramayana: The Epic, produced by Maya Entertainment, has now joined hands with the Vimanika comics team to convert their comic series The Sixth: Legend of Karna into a live action movie.

The film is the story of a successful businessman, who is forced to go to India to unravel the mysteries that have been haunting him since his childhood days.

The film will be digitally shot with the latest technology that has been used in the recent Hollywood films like Social Network and Pirates of the Caribbean-On Stranger Tides.

“This film has substantial amount of visual effects and chroma keying work. Sixty per cent of the film will be shot with chroma screen and the film will retain the flavour of the comic book artwork look. It will almost be like the characters from the book have come alive on screen,” Desai said in a press statement.

Desai believes that through this creative and artistic engagement with Vimanika Comics, a story inspired for many years will bring in a new format of filmmaking in India.
 

MUMBAI: Debut director Rakesh Ranjan Kumar’s Dear Friend Hitler is all set to release in May.

A multilingual, produced by Anil K Sharma, the film is based on letters written by Mahatma Gandhi to Adolf Hitler.

The film was initially thought to be controversial, but this died down after it was screened at the Berlin Film Festival recently where it was appreciated for depicting the facts without glorifying Hitler.

Raghuvir Yadav plays the role of the dictator while Neha Dhupia plays his lover Eva Braun.

Interestingly, Anupam Kher was to play the role of Hitler, but he backed out after Jewish organisations in India condemned him for enacting the ruthless ruler who had massacred millions of Jews.

MUMBAI: UTV Spotboy chief creative officer (CCO) Vikas Bahl has quit the organisation.

Confirming the news, UTV spokesperson said that he has quit UTV Spotboy. A trade website had reported the development on 5 March.

Bahl had joined UTV as EVP in 2007 and has co-directed a UTV Spotboy venture, Chillar Party, along with Nitesh Tiwari. The film is slated to release on 29 April.

Prior to joining UTV Spotboy, Bahl was Sab TV business head.
 

MUMBAI: This year‘s New York Indian Film Festival (NYIFF) will open with Disney‘s critically acclaimed family comedy Do Dooni Chaar.

The Habib Faisal-directed film, which will have its North American premiere, marks Disney‘s first live-action production in India.

Rituparno Ghosh‘s Noukadubi, an adaptation of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore‘s acclaimed novel, will be the closing film of the festival. The film stars sisters Riya and Raima Sen among others. Following the 8 May screening of Noukadub will be a special tribute to Tagore who was born 150 years ago on that day.

Aparna Sen‘s Iti Mrinalini will premiere as the Centrepiece selection. It features Sen and her daughter Konkona Sen Sharma, both playing the same title role at different ages.

Said IAAC Executive Director Aroon Shivdasani, “NYIFF energises New York City‘s diversity by presenting amazing independent and diaspora films from the Indian subcontinent while keeping a close watch on Bollywood‘s foray into alternate cinema. The three film highlights of our eleventh annual film festival represent a Hollywood studio‘s Indian social cinema, independent cinema, as well as a tribute to Rabindranath Tagore.”

MUMBAI: London-based Stormglass Productions has announced that its film Life Goes On will release in India on 25 March.

Starring the mother-daughter team of Sharmila Tagore and Soha Ali Khan, the film has been inspired by Shakespeare‘s English film King Lear that tries to find a new ground for the Elizabethan period drama in a contemporary multi-cultural British context.

The film, scripted, directed and produced by Sangeeta Datta, also has Om Puri and Girish Karnad playing important roles.

Coinciding with the celebration of Mother‘s Day, Life Goes On will be released on 11 March in the UK.

Besides screening at the Cannes Film Festival, the film had sold-out screenings at the New York (MIAAC Film Festival) and Mumbai Film Festival (MAMI).

The film has already won awards at the Pravasi International Festival, Delhi and the London Asian Film Festival.
 

MUMBAI: The 54th San Francisco International Film Festival has selected debutant director Aamir Bashir’s Harud (Autumn) to be one of the films for the ‘New Directors’ award.

The festival will go underway on 21 April and will go on till 5 May.

The ‘New Directors’ award of $15,000 is given to a narrative first feature that exhibits a unique artistic sensibility and deserves to be seen by as wide an audience as possible.

The film is the story of a young man who, mourning the disappearance of his elder brother, tries to make a life for himself in his violence-ridden home of Kashmir. The film is a powerful depiction of the loss and psychological decay caused by 20 years of violent conflict.

Seventeen countries contributed to the production of the 11 films in this year’s competition. An independent jury will select the winner of the ‘New Directors’ award and announce the same at the Golden Gate Awards on 4 May.

The festival will award close to $100,000 in total prizes this year.
 

MUMBAI: A drought of big ticket film releases is forcing multiplexes to turn to alternate content during the cricket World Cup as they do not want their revenues to be badly mauled.

PVR, the only multiplex to show the World Cup matches, is seeing a 4-5 percentage drop in occupancy. For the two India matches that the multiplex major has shown so far, the occupancy has gone up dramatically.

“We are only showing the India matches across our nine properties. The occupancy for these matches has been between 50-70 per cent, way ahead of last year‘s IPL (Indian Premier League) which was as low as 4-5 per cent,” says PVR Group president Pramod Arora.

PVR expects a drop in its fourth-quarter revenues over the year-ago period due to poor content and the World Cup. “We normally see a 25-26 per cent occupancy in the last quarter of the fiscal. This will slide further due to the World Cup. And don‘t forget, we had 3 Idiots in the fourth quarter of the last fiscal. We have had very poor software this quarter,” says Arora.

So will the broadcast of the World Cup matches on the PVR theatres not have a cushioning effect?

“We will definitely do better than the other multiplex chain operators. The South Indian side of the business is not impacted. The northern region is hurt and the western belt is partially impacted due to the festivals that we have run. We are showcasing the World Cup not so much from the commercial point of view but to reinforce PVR as a top-of-the-mind brand,” says Arora.

Cinemax expects to blunt the impact of the World Cup to some extent due to the differentiated content that it has lined up. “We have dropped the ticket prices by 30 per cent and come out with a month-long national film festival by the name of ‘Cinemax Movie Marathon‘. We are getting in a different kind of audience to sample our content. This is how we have managed to see an occupancy of 20-22 per cent, an almost five per cent drop due to the cricket season (same fall as last year due to the IPL). The revenue this quarter will stay flat compared to the same period last fiscal as we have added properties,” says Cinemax India chief executive officer Sunil Punjabi.

The ‘Movie Marathon‘, held from 4 to 31 March, has been designed on themes. The inaugural week will have a sci-fi film festival that will showcase the best of Hollywood science fictions like Inception, Avatar and 2012 among others. Week two, from 11 to 17 March, has been dedicated to Tamil superstar Rajnikant and named Rajnikant Film Festival. The whole week will show two of the superstar‘s films – Robot and Sivaji-The boss.

The pan-India Regional Film Festival will follow in week three from 18 to 24 March. In this, there would be film festivals of regional language at various centres. There will, thus, be a Marathi film festival in Maharashtra, a Telugu film festival in Andhra Pradesh and a Bengali film festival in West Bengal.

The Multilingual Film Festival, to be held from 25 to 31 March, will screen films of four Indian languages – Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam and Telugu. There are movies like Pangira, Ideachi Kalpana, Magadheera, Maryada Ramanna, Mommy & Me, Pokkri Raja, Ekti Tarar Khoje, Autograph and Challenge.

Big Cinemas has unleashed a spate of Oscar-winning films for its patrons.

Reliance MediaWorks CEO Anil Arjun, however, did not want to comment on how big the impact of the World Cup will be on the company‘s film exhibition business.