Category: Hindi

MUMBAI: Amitabh Bachchan will play Rabindranath Tagore in a biopic temporarily titled Sound of Silence.

The film is being made to coincide with the 150th birth anniversary of the Nobel Laureate poet.

The English film to be directed by Ujjwal Chatterjee will have screenplay by noted lyricist Javed Akhtar. The film will focus on the last 20 years of Tagore‘s life.

Confirming that he will write the screenplay and the dialogues, Akhtar said that the film will be based on a story to be prepared jointly by scholars William Radice and Nilanjan Bandyopadhyay. “This is an extremely serious project and I will start writing the screenplay and dialogues after I get the research material from scholars working at archives in Santiniketan and elsewhere. I will have to study each detail carefully because I will be handling an icon like Tagore,” Akhtar added.
 

MUMBAI: Reliance MediaWorks has acquired North American rights of culinary comedy, Today‘s Special, that stars Aasif Mandvi and features Indian actress and cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey.

Directed by David Kaplan, the English-language film, written by Mandvi and Jonathan Bines, is based on Mandvi‘s play Sakina‘s Restaurant in which the actor plays a chef who dreams of opening an upscale Manhattan eatery but is forced to take over his family‘s tandoori restaurant in the Little India neighborhood of Jackson Heights in Queens.

The film was produced by Nimitt Mankad‘s Inimitable as the company‘s first feature and Lillian LaSalle‘s Sweet 180. The movie also stars Naseeruddin Shah, Jess Weixler, Kevin Corrigan and Dean Winters.

Reliance, which has been making inroads into the US market with films like Raavan and 3 Idiots, will release Today‘s Special nationwide on 8 October.

Today‘s Special premiered last fall at the London Film Festival, was the opening-night film at the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival and won audience prizes at fests in Palm Springs and Minneapolis-St. Paul.
 

MUMBAI: The Taipei Economic and Cultural Centre, New Delhi, in association with the Directorate of Film Festivals, will be hosting a Retrospective Film Festival of director Ang Lee from 23 to 25 July at Siri Fort Auditorium, New Delhi. Thereafter, the movies will be showcased in Pune and Kolkata.

The five films that will be screened on the occasion are Fine Line, Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. This festival traces Ang Lee‘s journey starting from his first college.

Out of the five films that will be showcased, four have been produced by international producer Hus Li-Kong who will also be the chief guest at the inauguration ceremony in Delhi.

Ang Lee attributes his success to him and feels that without Hsu he would not have been where he is today. Lee, who would not be attending, will be sending his message on a DVD that will be screened for viewers at the inauguration.

Ang Lee is a symbol of Taiwan‘s creativity. He is one of the seven directors to win the Oscar, the Golden Globe, Director‘s Guild and BAFTA for the same movie, Brokeback Mountain, that released in 2005.

His films have been well received by audiences not only in Taiwan but all over the world, because of the striking diversity, as well as Lee‘s recurring themes of alienation, marginalisation, and repression.

Taiwani Ambassador Wenchyi Ong said, “India is a land of film lovers and Taiwan‘s film industry is already well-known in the international arena for having a large number of talented and creative individuals. Our films, I Can‘t Live Without You and Wall, won the Golden Peacock Award at IFFI in 2007 and 2009 and I do hope that through Ang Lee‘s retrospective, Indians will be able to connect to one of Taiwan‘s most loved directors and his heart warming films.”
 

MUMBAI: Undeterred by the cancellation of Lamhaa in Kashmir recently, Onir, best known for his films like My Brother… Nikhil (2005) Bas Ek Pal and Sorry Bhai! is going ahead to release his film I Am Meghna in Kashmir shortly.

I Am Meghna, which centres around the plight of Kashmir pandits who have to leave their homes in the middle of the night and restart their lives elsewhere, has been backed by several Kashmiris who have invested financially and emotionally.

So much is the director fond of Kashmiris that he and his Kashmiri actor-friend Sanjay Suri have planned to go to Srinagar every year to conduct three-month workshops for young students that will expose them to cinema filmmaking techniques and the world outside.

Meanwhile, Onir‘s first script Sabh has been picked up by the NFDC for the Screenwriters Lab 2010, the first of which would be held at Locarno from 6 to 11 August.
 

BANGALORE: PVR Pictures has tapped a senior Reliance Big Pictures and BigFlix executive to head its operations.

Kamal Gianchandani, COO at Reliance Big Pictures and BigFlix, has rejoined PVR Pictures as president. He will be based out of Mumbai and will lead the entire operations of PVR Pictures.

Says PVR Chairman and Managing Directtor Ajay Bijli, “In his role at PVR Pictures, Kamal will build on the existing capabilities and strengthen our Motion Picture business; his experience will be of tremendous value to our organisation and in delivering our business objectives.”

Gianchandani has spent his 15-year career in a range of general management, new media, film financing, co-production, distribution, licensing, syndication, film exhibition and multiplex operations positions.

Prior to his current responsibilities at PVR Pictures, he was with Reliance Big Pictures from 2006 as COO with end-to-end responsibility of the company’s theatrical distribution and licensing business. Under his stewardship, the company acquired and distributed some of the biggest Indian hits of recent times including the 3 Idiots.

Gianchandani is also credited with setting up and managing the company’s syndication arm successfully. In addition, as COO, BigFlix, his leadership was marked by inception and bolstering of the company’s online mail-order movie rental service as also a movie streaming portal i.e. Bigflix.com, a video portal for Indian movies and entertainment content.
 

MUMBAI: Giving the horror genre a push with both versions of Phoonk failing at the box-office, Ram Gopal Varma is back to doing films on the crime sector.

The director, who made films like Company that was loosely based on Indian mafia organisation D-Company, is all set to make his next film Department that will be based on the lives of encounter cops Daya Nayak and Pradeep Sawant.

Though the subject of the film will be the relationship between the police and the underwold, in Department the portrayal will be in a realistic manner. The film will deal with the forming of the encounter sqad and will follow the lives of the encounter cops and their friendship and rivalries.

Forming the cast of the film would be Sanjay Dutt who had last worked with the director in Daud and Abhishek Bachchan. However, the selection of an actor who would portray the character of the current Director General of Police of Mumbai, D Sivanathan, is still underway.
 

NEW DELHI: The controversial film ‘When Kiran met Karen’ by America-based Manan Singh Katohora, which has failed to get an Indian release more than two years after its completion because of its controversial theme of lesbianism, has become the first South Asian lesbian film to get digital worldwide release barring India.

This controversial cross-cultural film has already been screened at 52 International Film Festivals after its debut screening in Germany at the 18th Annual Verzaubert International Queer Film Festival.

Written, produced and directed by Manan Singh Katohora, the film explores the theme of lesbianism and pushes the boundaries of a taboo romance within the South Asian culture. It stars Samrat Chakrabarti, Chriselle Almeida, Kelli Holsopple, Sonny Suri, Manish Dayal, Shetal Shah, Iggy Ignatius, and Emmy-nominated Tirlok Malik who is himself an eminent producer-director-actor. The film’s Producer/Cinematographer is Punit Chhabra while the Executive Producers are Iggy Ignatius and Mano Kesavan. The film features the music of Deadbeat Darling and Katherine Almeida.

The story is about a famous Bollywood actress, Kiran, who meets a lesbian journalist, Karen – 3 days before the release of her international film – ‘A Himalayan Love Story‘.

The film can be seen online on https://dingora. com/when- kiran-met- karen. The idea for Dingora came to Pankaj Sikka, a resident of the US, when he drove for eight hours to catch Ram Gopal Varma‘s Company, because no theatre close to him was showing it. This made him realise that only certain pockets of the NRI market were privileged to catch their favourite desi actor in all his glory.

A surprisingly large number of non resident Indian Hindi film fans have no access to Bollywood, he says, adding that “Dingora is a combination of various technologies. Google helped us in mapping and we have tied up with Microsoft.”

He also said there is no chance of the film being stolen while being streamed. Dingora mainly focuses on reaching 30 million NRIs. Big releases reach where the concentration of Indians is large — New York, Chicago.

The film is also the first Indian-American film to be screened at the Pennsylvania State University in a screening organised by the Coalition of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Ally (LGBTA) Graduate Students in the One in Ten film festival. It also featured in the Delray Beach Film Festival, Florida, in May 2009 last year.
 

MUMBAI: It‘s a rare honour for Indian cinema this year at the first annual London Indian Film Festival.

While Dibakar Banerjee‘s Love, Sex aur Dhoka premiered on the opening night of the festival, Umesh Kulkarni‘s The Well (Vihir) will close the festival on 20 July.

Producer and lead star of the film Girish Kulkarni, who will grace the Red Carpet for the festival‘s closing film, will be joined by an array of luminaries spanning industry stalwarts, VIPs and film celebrities.

The Well has been feted globally following its World Premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. Stunningly filmed amongst the grandeur of the rolling Indian plains, the film is a moving ‘coming of age‘ tale that boldly captures the very essence of adolescence and the moments that define it.

It tells the story of young Sameer as he leaves the city with his parents to visit their family in the countryside, who are preparing for a wedding. Sameer, however, has only one aim, to meet his cousin and best friend Nachiket.

The two adolescent boys are inseparable and Sameer looks up to his older, free thinking cousin, who teaches him many truths as they stand at the cross-roads of their lives, with the innocence of childhood slipping away. This change is echoed by the fate of Sameer‘s female cousin, who is being forced into a marriage for the family‘s petty gains. Nachiket becomes increasingly distraught by this marriage, until he can take it no longer, leading to an action that will change Sameer‘s young life forever.

India is the largest film producing country in the world, creating up to 1,000 films a year out stripping that of Hollywood. But apart from mainstream Bollywood, very few of such films are seen in the UK.

Says Festival Director Cary Rajinder Sawhney, “We have been delighted with the response we have received thus far at the festival. UK is the largest consumer of Bollywood outside of India and we were fully aware of its relevance and significance here. Following the feedback we have received on the festival which has showcased a carefully selected repertoire of parallel Indian cinema, it‘s great to see the increasing appetite for independent Indian films and we do hope in time great movies such as The Well will be screened and talked about more broadly in the UK.”

MUMBAI: Artificial Eye has bagged the distribution rights of Peepli Live, a farcical contemporary comedy set in rural India, for UK.

The film, written and directed by Anusha Rizvi and produced by Aamir Khan and Kiran Rao along with Ronnie Screwvala, tells the story of an impoverished farmer who learns of a government scheme to aid the families of indebted farmers if they commit suicide and, thus, decides on a very drastic plan to save his land from re-possession.

The film stars Khan along with Raghubir Yadav, television presenter Malaika Shenoy, Shalini Vatsa, Farrukh Jaffer, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Vishal Sharma.

Peepli Live was the first Indian film to release in the World Cinema competitive section at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year before it was screened at this year‘s Berlin International Film Festival.

Artificial Eye, a DVD distributor in the US and UK, specialises in foreign-language film distribution for the UK market.
 

MUMBAI: Action director Allan Amin is in talks with US-based Taurus Academy to open a stunt in the city.

It is said that Taurus Stunt Academy, in its intention to branch out in India, approached Amin to set up a stunt school in Mumbai for them. “I think it‘s a great idea because they have the best stunt coordinators in the world,” avers Amin.

Amin is now on the lookout for big names in the film industry who could be brand ambassadors of the Academy for which he has zeroed in on Sunil Shetty, Akshay Kumar and South star Akkineni Nagarjuna. All the three have evinced their interest of being involved with the upcoming Academy.

Amin, who is presently working on the remake of Italian Job, was nominated for the Taurus World Stunts Awards for Dhoom 2 in 2006.