MUMBAI: Percept Picture Company (PPC) is ready to release Nandita Das‘s directorial debut Firaaq… In Such Times in October.
The film, starring Naseeruddin Shah, Raghuvir Yadav, Paresh Rawal, Deepti Naval and Tisca Arora, is set in the aftermath of a communal riot.
Firaaq is about a Hindu Dalit rural family who live on the Indo-Pak border. Ramchand, a seven-year-old boy, and his father accidentally cross the border and are then taken to the Kutch jail.
MUMBAI: Shree Ashtavinayak Cine Vision is investing Rs 9 billion for production of 20 films which will include its foray into regional language cinema.
A producer of Hindi hits like Jab We Met and Bhagambhag, Shree Ashtavinayak intends to produce four films in the Tamil and Telugu segment.
In the “multiple” production pipeline, the first to release will be Shivam Nair’s suspense thriller Maharathi, starring Naseruddin Shah, Om Puri, Paresh Rawal, Boman Irani and Neha Dhupia. The film will hit the screens on 22 August.
This will be followed by the release of Sanjay Gadhvi’s Kidnap on 2 October and Rohit Shetty’s Golmaal Returns on 24 October. While the cast of Kidnap include Sanjay Dutt, Minnisha Lamba, Vidya Malvade, Rahul Dev and Imran Khan, Golmaal Returns stars Ajay Devgan, Tusshar Kapoor, Arshad Warsi, Shreyas Talpade and Kareena Kapoor.
Meanwhile, the ongoing projects from the Ashtavinayak kitty that are currently under production include Blue and Luck. Directed by Anthony D’Souza, Blue stars Sanjay Dutt, Akshaye Kumar, Lara Dutta, Katrina Kaif and Zayed Khan. The cast of Soham Shah’s Luck, which marks the debut of Kamal Hasan’s daughter Sruti Hassan, include Sanjay Dutt, Imran Khan, Danny Denzongpa, Ravi Kissen and Mithun Chakraborty.
Also, the projects in pipeline include Neeraj Vora‘s two films namely Run Bhola Run starring Govinda, Tusshar Kapoor, Tanushree Dutta and Amisha Patel and One Way Ticket starring Anil Kapoor and Akshaye Khanna.
Shree Ashtavinayak has also closed two separate co-production deals with Sri Jaganaath Entertainment and Sanjay Dutt Productions. While it will be co-producing Mudh Mudh Ke Na Dekh Mudh Mudh Ke with the former, it will co-produce Bond with the latter.
The company has also signed up directors like Rummi Jaffery, Vivek Sharma, Rohit Shetty and Imtiaz Ali for its untitled projects.
Shree Ashtavinayak raised $33 million via FCCBs (foreign currency convertible bonds) last year. The issue had an additional option to raise $5 million.
MUMBAI: Pyramid Saimira, the worldwide distributors of Rajinikanth’s Kuselan, has postponed the release date of the film to 1 August.
The bilingual film (Tamil and Telugu), which will hit the theatres with 1000 prints worldwide, was earlier slated to release on 25 July. However, the delay occurred due to post production work.
A remake of the Malayalam movie Kadha Parayumpol, the film will be released simultaneously in Tamil and Telugu as Kuselan and Kathanayukudu respectively.
Kuselan, directed by P. Vasu, will feature Rajinikanth in 20 costumes. Pyramid Saimira is expecting the film to take the best-ever opening of 2008.
MUMBAI: Hancock, Will Smith‘s latest release that tells the story of a grubby superhero, has grossed $66 million over the holiday weekend at the US box office.
Since opening, the Sony Pictures Entertainment’s comic action movie has scored $107.3 million in the US market and it has collected approximately $78 million from overseas.
The film, which currently holds the number one position in the North American box office chart, is Smith’s eighth consecutive number one opening, beginning with Men in Black II, which opened in July 2002.
Hancock is directed by Peter Berg. The film had its world premiere as the opener at the 30th Moscow International Film Festival on 19 June.
Also, Disney’s Wall-E, a computer animated adventure comedy science fiction film produced by Pixar Animation Studios, has obtained the second place on the US charts collecting a gross of $33.4 million during the same US weekend.
MUMBAI: Sony Pictures Entertainment has entered into an exclusive multi-year, first-look deal with Charles Roven and Atlas Entertainment.
Roven, along with Atlas producer Richard Suckle, are producing Columbia Pictures’ The International, starring Clive Owen and Naomi Watts and directed by Tom Tykwer, set for release next year. Together with Atlas’ Alex Gartner, Roven produced Get Smart. Roven also produced the new Batman film The Dark Knight which has been directed by Christopher Nolan.
Sony Pictures Entertainment co-chairman Amy Pascal says, “Chuck and I go back a long time to the days of working with Dawn Steel when we were launching Turner Pictures. I truly value a producer who can do it all and make it look easy. Chuck is equal parts Renaissance man and business man. He is the kind of producer who delivers entertaining and engaging material on time and on budget and that‘s a rare commodity these days. I am thrilled to be reuniting with him and the tremendous team at Atlas once again.”
Roven adds, “We are in a fortunate position at Atlas to be able to explore many different opportunities. Amy, Matt and I developed a number of great properties at Turner, and I’m very excited to finally have the chance to bring our relationship full circle. Every division at Sony Pictures excels at what they do and all of us at Atlas are delighted to be expanding an already productive filmmaking experience.”
NEW DELHI: Manoj Srivastava, who until recently was deputy director in the Directorate of Film Festivals, has taken over as the chief executive officer of the Entertainment Society of Goa (ESG).
ESG is a state government body that has been set up to coordinate with the centre for the organisation of the International film festivals of India.
He succeeds Nandini Paliwal, an Indian administrative service officer from the Union Territory cadre, who was posted to the north east after the conclusion of IFFI 2007 in December 2007. The post had been vacant for more than four months.
A professional filmmaker, trained at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune, Srivastava worked with Doordarshan as a producer for 15 years before joining the Directorate eight years ago.
As a filmmaker, his film Hum Panchhi Ek Dal Ke participated in Cannes Film Festival this year. It is being screened next week in Kabul in a special exposition and has also been selected for the Brisbane International Film festival early next month. His next film project is the Journey Of The Brahmputra, which he plans to shoot in China, India and Bangladesh.
As a producer with Doordarshan, he handled shows like Zubin Mehta concerts, and live telecasts from Parliament, apart from high profile programmes like The Big Question with Karan Thapar. He directed 26 episodes of the programme, apart from shows like Mirror of the World. He also covered the Kargil war with DD News.
As a film critic, he has written on cinema and television for publications and websites, which includes editing of two Indian Panorama and two National Film Award books. His book on the history of Indian Cinema titled ‘Wide Angle’ is being published soon by Penguin India, and a novel ‘Evil Within’ is ready for publishing.
MUMBAI: PVR has launched PVR Centra, its four-screen multiplex in Chandigarh.
The property, with a sitting capacity of 1141 seats, will be open to public from 4 July.
The new multiplex boasts of leg rooms, liberal seat width, swanky interiors, and state of the art sound and projection system for movie goers.
With the opening of PVR Centra, the total number of PVR screens in operation has gone up to 101 at 25 locations across 14 cities in nine states and one Union Territory.
NEW DELHI: The Osian‘s-Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema is set to give away the Lifetime Achievement Award for Contribution to Cinema, a newly introduced category, to filmmaker Mrinal Sen.
The writer’s award, renamed as the Aruna Vasudev Lifetime Achievement Award for writing on cinema, will be conferred on Jose “Pete” F. Lacaba from the Philippines.
The awards will be presented during the Festival, held in New Delhi from 10 to 20 July 2008.
Around 200 feature and short fiction films from around 40 countries are to be screened at this year’s Osian‘s-Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema.
Addressing a press meet here today, Osian’s Connoisseurs of Art Chairman Neville Tuli announced that the award money this year would be approximately $ 250, 000 for the competition sections and lifetime achievement awards. The winners of the Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented Rs. 800,000 each.
The Best Films in the Asian-Arab and Indian Competition sections will be awarded Rs two million each and the best director in each section will win Rs 800,000.
The special jury award and the best actor and actress will each take away Rs 200,000. The best first feature will receive Rs 200,000 in addition to a guaranteed support of Rs 800,000 from FOOD: The Film Fund – Osian‘s Originating Development, created by Osian‘s, for the next feature film.
An Audience Award is also being set up for a film in competition and will win Rs 200,000.
The new competition section dealing with themes of In-Tolerance has been created this year to showcase feature and documentary films that respond to or deal with the intolerance of our times. The best film in this category will take home a cash award of Rs 800,000.
Indonesian actress and producer Christine Hakim will preside over the international jury of the forthcoming 10th Osian’s-Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema next month. The Indian members of the juries are: Ketan Mehta, Sai Paranjpye, Nagesh Kukunoor, Bappaditya Bandopadhyay, Arun Khopkar and Meena Karnik.
The event will also unveil the scale model of the Osianama, Osian’s flagship cultural complex. The seven-section Osianama, which will open in Mumbai in mid-2009, will house two screens apart from a debating house for discussion on cinema.
In addition, it will have Osian’s film house, archives and offices for its other activities.
Furthermore, Latika Padgaonkar and Indu Shrikent have taken over the realms of the festival in Delhi with its director Aruna Vasudev, founder of the festival in 1999, deciding to step down.
MUMBAI: Paramount Pictures has announced that Indiana Jones, the fourth film in the Indiana Jones franchise, and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has crossed the $300 million mark at the US box office. It has also topped $400 million overseas. With a cumulative gross of more than $713 million to date, it is the highest grossing worldwide release of 2008, the studio says.
The film gave Paramount‘s distribution arm its second $300 million plus release for the summer joining Marvel Entertainment‘s Iron Man, which has grossed more than $309 million so far in the US and almost $250 million overseas.
Paramount says that it, thus, becomes the first studio in movie history to release two back-to-back $300 million plus grossing films two years in a row. In 2007, two consecutive Paramount releases, Shrek the Third and Transformers, both surpassed $300 million in the US.
MUMBAI: Cinemax has joined hands with Mam Movies, organizers of the ‘I Am The Change’ film project, wherein the multiplex chain operator will premiere and host all the films made under the project.
‘I Am The Change’ is a film making initiative taken up by Mam Movies which invites 101 filmmakers from all across India to make films on 101 NGOs, based in four metropolitan cities, within a time-span of 101 hours.
The shooting of these group projects will take place from 3 July to 7 July in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai. Post the completion of the shooting process, the edited five minute video will be showcased as a part of a film festival held in Mumbai at the Cinemax theatres, Versova.
“The final films selected will be premiered on 1 August at Cinemax Versova where a panel of celebrity judges will judge the best films and award prizes to the winners. Filmmaker Anupam Kher, along with his acting school Actor Prepares will also be awarding the winner of the best film in the children’s category with a trophy and a prize money of Rs 51,000,” said Mam movies team head Madhusudan.
“After the premier, Cinemax will host a film festival where all these films will be screened from 4 August to 7 August,” added Madhusudan.
Additionally, OOH Media, the out-of-home media partners for this event, has organized a sub-contest for the project wherein the participants could make an additional short trailer of their films, the time duration of which should be less than 59 seconds. These trailers will then be screened pan India across all platforms.