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Tag: Oscar

  • Activities of NRI Film Producers Association kick starts at Pravasi Bharatiya Divas

    Activities of NRI Film Producers Association kick starts at Pravasi Bharatiya Divas

    MUMBAI: Non Resident Indian Producers Association (NRIPA) on Wednesday kick started its journey in making films at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas conference in Kochi.

     

    All this was at the behest of renowned filmmaker and president of NRIPA Sohan Roy who gained international acceptance and recognition by his film DAM 999. NRIPA has been formed with an aim to be the most useful and efficient association in the film industry by promoting new generation film makers and nurturing a fresh culture within the industry.

     

    Talking at the launch, Roy said, “As a producer of my first project, I have learnt that making films in India provides a big heap of opportunity for any producer to make money but I also learnt the hard fact that the most first timers don‘t make it into the profit zone purely because of their ignorance.

     

    You will also be surprised to know the reality that the largest film producing nation in the world has the least presence in international film circuits. Indian films rarely make attempts to make their presence felt at the 40 internationally recognized film marketing zones. This is purely because of the ignorance about the opportunities existing outside. With NRIPA I would like to obliterate this ignorance by giving my fellow film makers the right guidance.”

     

    NRIPA has launched with the major objective of bringing enthusiastic potential NRI producers to invest in the brand called ‘Film India‘ and to ensure profitable returns to the investment.

     

    Saint Dracula 3D the world‘s first 3D Dracula movie is the first project under NRIPA. It has already made it into the Oscar selections in different categories this year with the help of NRIPA.

  • Film Independent announces nominees for next year’s Spirit Awards

    Film Independent announces nominees for next year’s Spirit Awards

    MUMBAI: Wes Anderson‘s Moonrise Kingdom and David O. Russell‘s Silver Linings Playbook dominate the field with five nominations each at the 2013 Spirit Awards.
    They will compete for best feature award alongside Beasts of the Southern Wild, Bernie and Keep the Lights On.

    Moonrise also scored nominations for director Anderson, its screenplay by Anderson and Roman Coppola, supporting actor Bruce Willis and Robert Yeoman‘s cinematography. The Focus Features release that debuted at the Cannes Film Festival was also named best feature at the 22nd Gotham Independent Film Awards.

    In addition to Moonrise‘s Anderson, other directors who have been nominated include Playbook‘s David O. Russell, Beasts‘ Benh Zeitlin and Lights‘ Ira Sachs. The fifth directing slot went to The Loneliest Planet‘s helmer Julia Loktev.

    Playbook‘s two lead actors – Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence – both earned nominations in the acting categories. The Sessions, the account of a man living with an iron lung who seeks out his first sexual experience, also picked up two acting nominations — one for lead actor John Hawkes and another for supporting actress Helen Hunt. The mother-daughter movie, Middle of Nowhere, was represented by three acting nominations, with Emayatzy Corinealdi in the best actress category, Lorraine Toussaint in supporting actress and David Oyelowo in supporting actor. Matthew McConaughey was not only nominated as lead actor for playing the title role in the crime movie Killer Joe but also as supporting male for emceeing a club full of male strippers in Magic Mike.

    Rounding out the list of lead actors were Bernie‘s Jack Black; Lights‘ Thure Lindhardt and Four‘s Wendell Pierce. The lead actress contingent also included Return‘s Linda Cardellini, Smashed‘s Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Beasts‘ young Quvenzhane Wallis.

    On the documentary front, the Spirit nominations singled out David France‘s How to Survive a Plague, which looks at the gay community‘s response to the AIDS crisis, Matthew Akers‘ Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, a portrait of the Serbian performance artist, The Central Park Five, an account of injustice in New York City from Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon, Kirby Dick‘s The Invisible War, which investigates rape within the military and Peter Nicks‘ The Waiting Room, which examines the health crisis by focusing on one public hospital.

    In the best international film category, two of this year‘s most celebrated films from Cannes — Michael Haneke‘s Amour and Jacques Audiard‘s Rust and Bone — will compete with Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, from Turkey; Ursula Meier‘s Sister, from Switzerland; and Kim Nguyen‘s War Witch, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, which also happens to be Canada‘s submission for the foreign-language film Oscar.

    Film Independent also announced that it will give its annual Robert Altman Award, which recognizes a film‘s director, casting director and ensemble cast, to Sean Baker‘s Starlet.
    Among distributors, Fox Searchlight could boast of the most nominations. It collected nine nominations for Beasts, Sessions, Ruby Sparks and Sound of My Voice. Music Box Films also had surprisingly strong showing with seven noms spread among Lights, Abramovic and Starlet. IFC Films, Focus and Sony Pictures Classics each collected six nominations.

    Winners of the Spirit Awards will be announced Feb. 23 at the annual awards luncheon held in a tent on the beach in Santa Monica. The ceremony will be broadcast that evening at 10 p.m. ET/PT on IFC.

  • Danny Boyle, Judi Dench honoured

    Danny Boyle, Judi Dench honoured

    MUMBAI: Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle and Judi Dench were among the winners at the 58th London Evening Standard Theatre Awards in London on Sunday evening.
     
    Boyle and his creative team were honoured with the Beyond Theatre award for their work on the London 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony. British cycling star Victoria Pendleton presented the award.
     
    It may be recalled that Boyle served as the art director for the ceremony that featured many nods to British culture and theater.
     
    Dench received the Moscow Art Theatre‘s Golden Seagull award for her contribution to world theater. Though Oscar winner Cate Blanchett was among the nominees in the best actress category, she lost out to Hattie Morahan who won for her role as a housewife in A Doll‘s House.
     
    The best musical award went to Sweeney Todd, the latest stage version of the play that Tim Burton had brought to the big screen with Johnny Depp under the title Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in 2007.

  • Oscar winning director Ang Lee to visit India for ‘Life Of Pi’

    Oscar winning director Ang Lee to visit India for ‘Life Of Pi’

    NEW DELHI: Academy Award Winning Director Ang Lee is coming to India as part of a grand promotional tour for 20th Century Fox’s Oscar buzz generating festive release ‘Life Of Pi’ directed by him.

    Fox Star Studios have earlier hosted eminent personalities such as Danny Boyle, Hugh Jackman and Titanic‘s Jon Landau in India.

    India will be the first country to be visited by Lee – the film has an Indian angle since it stars Suraj Sharma, Tabu and Irrfan Khan.

    Lee will also be presenting exclusive and unseen 20 minutes of the film in stunning 3D to media and prominent Bollywood personalities to showcase the extraordinary experience of watching the celebrated novel come to life onscreen.

    The man behind some of the most prestigious and acclaimed films such as Sense and Sensibility (1995), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film), Hulk (2003), and Brokeback Mountain (for which he won an Academy Award for Best Director), Ang Lee will visit Mumbai and Chennai along with David Lee (Co-Producer of Life Of Pi), main lead and debutante Suraj Sharma, Tabu and Irrfan Khan.

    Fox Star Studios CEO Vijay Singh said, “Ang is scheduled to arrive in India on 28 October 2012 for a two-city Mumbai-Chennai visit where he will also showcase exclusive visuals from the film for a select audience. This visit will also kick start the extravagant scale of activities planned, building on the excitement and anticipation that has been growing for ‘Life of Pi‘ since its trailer launch. Not only is it a stunning showcase of the immense acting talent and breathtaking locales of our country, it is also one of those rare works of cinema that transcends boundaries with its universal appeal.”

    ‘Life of Pi’ 3D release is scheduled on 23 November in English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.

    The film showcases stunning scenes with Sharma, and veterans Tabu and Khan in the film along with breathtakingly vibrant colours of Pondicherry and Munnar where the film was extensively shot.

    From the Oscar winning director, Life of Pi 3D is the visually stunning tale of a boy who is adrift at sea in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger after his family is drowned in a shipwreck. The Indian appeal of Ang Lee’s magnum opus is visible with every scene of the film right from the star cast to the locales and magical elements that combine to make this a special festive treat for fans!

    The theatrical promo also featured the Indian stars, and the trailer immediately went viral with laudatory reactions pouring in on various social networking sites.

    The film centers on Piscine Molitor Patel (Pi) who is raised in Pondicherry India with his family who run a zoo. They decide to immigrate to Canada, taking their animals along with them and set off on a huge freighter ship, steaming from India across the Pacific. But a terrible storm destroys the ship. The family and most of the animals perish. Pi survives, stranded on a lifeboat with several animals. Ultimately it is just Pi and a Bengal tiger who miraculously survive 227 days at sea.

    Lee has shot ‘Life of Pi’ in 3D, utilising groundbreaking techniques to capture the story’s epic scope. India had much to rejoice when Lee chose 17-year-old newcomer Suraj Sharma to essay the role of Pi. Sharma lives with his mathematician parents in Delhi. He has no previous acting experience and was cast following an extensive, months-long search. Over 3000 young men auditioned for the part.

    Not only is the film a global platform of Indian talent with its cast and crew, but some of India’s most scenic spots were tapped for the film, a first of its kind for a Hollywood film. Amidst racks of fabulous saris and colorful fabrics, many of which were used for the vibrant market scenes filmed in Pondicherry, India, where Pi spent his early years, there is a rich multicultural depth to the movie. One can see the countryside of Southern India in the hillside town of Munnar along with the French elegance of Pondicherry on 3D!

    The film is based on Yann Martel’s book, one of the biggest publishing events of the past decade. The book has sold over seven million copies worldwide and continues to sell over 1,000 copies per week and has won the prestigious Mann Booker Prize, and was a New York Times bestseller for over a year.

  • Aurelio De Laurentiis announces $ 100 mn expansion plan

    Aurelio De Laurentiis announces $ 100 mn expansion plan

    MUMBAI: Italian film producer Aurelio De Laurentiis has announced an ambitious $100 million expansion plan for his Filmauro production house. He has also opined on a variety of topics including a new strategy for film distribution, criticism of Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti‘s alleged disinterest in film and an end to Filmauro‘s highly profitable Christmas film franchise.

    The expansion plans, involving Universal Pictures International Italy, were the centerpiece of the gregarious De Laurentiis‘ meandering 80-minute monologue at Universal‘s Rome headquarters, with Universal Italy president Richard Borg and De Laurentiis‘ son, Luigi De Laurentiis also present.

    De Laurentiis said he would produce at least 20 films in conjunction with Universal Italy, including some international titles. Among them: the Steve Jobs biopic Jobs: Get Inspired and a yet-unnamed project he said would be based on a Truman Capote story and would star Leonardo DiCaprio and Ryan Gosling.

    De Laurentiis, 63, nephew of the late famed producer Dino De Laurentiis, also predicted that comedic actor Christian De Sica, the son of iconic Italian director Vittorio De Sica would try his hand increasingly at directing in the future.

    The Italian productions he said are in the works include Colpi di fulmine (Lightning Strike), the latest comedy from Neri Parenti, a comedy he said would be called Mr. Love, another featuring popular comic Carlo Verdone called Sei personaggi in cerca d‘amore (Six Characters in Search of Love) and three films from young director Alberto Ferrari, including one that De Laurentiis said Oscar-winning actor and director Roberto Benigni wanted but that De Laurentiis snatched away from him.

    The producer also said that he would make his first foray into television next year, with a project of six 100-minute episodes taken from a book by best-selling author Giorgio Faletti.

    He also said he soon will travel to Los Angeles to meet with Universal brass to discuss a still wider agreement with the company, covering territories other than Italy.

  • Oscar-nominated Hollywood screenwriter Nora Ephron no more

    Oscar-nominated Hollywood screenwriter Nora Ephron no more

    MUMBAI: Oscar-nominated Hollywood screenwriter and director Nora Ephron expired on Tuesday in New York at the age of 71.
    Ephron died in Manhattan of complications from the blood disorder myelodysplasia, with which she was diagnosed six years ago. She is survived by her husband and two sons.
    Her 15 film credits include films like You‘ve Got Mail, Silkwood and Julie and Julia that was her last film in 2009. Though she was nominated for an Oscar three times, she never won the award.
    Ephron was born on 19 May 1941 in New York to a Broadway playwright and a Hollywood screenwriter. She took her mother‘s advice – “take notes, everything is copy” – very seriously and turned wry personal observations on relationships into hugely successful romantic comedies.
    From an early age, Ephron wrote essays for major US magazines from the late 1960s as well as several non-fiction books, including two recent memoirs.
    She was married three times, once to Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporter who helped uncover the ‘Watergate‘ scandal. Their marriage ended publicly when he began an affair with the wife of the then-British ambassador, Margaret Jay, who was also the daughter of former British Prime Minister James Callaghan.
    Ephron‘s divorce from Bernstein resulted in the novel Heartburn that she converted into a film starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.
    Her first marriage to writer Dan Greenburg ended in 1976. Ephron‘s third marriage to Nicholas Pileggi, who wrote the screenplays for the Martin Scorsese films Goodfellas and Casino, lasted for more than 20 years.
    Rumours of her death started circulating on Tuesday evening after her friend, celebrity columnist Liz Smith, published an online memorial.

  • Asghar Farhadi wins Cannes prize to help fund next film

    Asghar Farhadi wins Cannes prize to help fund next film

    MUMBAI: Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, who won this year‘s foreign-language picture Academy Award for his film A Separation, claimed a prize at Cannes to help fund his next film with fellow Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard.
     
    Farhadi accepted the European Union‘s Prix Media with $77,000 cash award and later said that he would start filming the as-yet untitled picture starring Cotillard and fellow French actor Tahar Rahim later this year.
     
    “At a time when some politicians are trying to transform the beautiful rainbow of cultural diversity in the world into a field of differences and confrontations, I see this distinction as a very encouraging sign,” Farhadi has been quoted to have said.
     
    Cotillard, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of French torch singer Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose, is appearing in this year‘s Cannes contender Rust and Bone directed by Jacques Audiard.

  • New dates of Rome fest announced

    New dates of Rome fest announced

    MUMBAI: The International Rome Film Festival‘s board has officially approved a plan to shift the 7-year-old festival‘s dates to November. Accordingly, the festival that was to be held from 27 October to 4 November will now be held from 9 to 17 November.

    With the announcement of the new dates, the Rome festival has avoided a direct conflict with the 30-year-old Turin Film Festival that will take place from 23 November to 1 December.

    The organisers of the Rome festival believe that by changing its dates to November, the festival‘s The Business Street market event will gain stronger footing as a halfway point between the big markets at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and the Berlin International Film Festival in February. They are also in a hope that with a late-in-the-year date the festival might serve as a new springboard for winter releases either vying for Oscar eligibility or the Christmas time box office.

    The Rome festival board also approved the festival‘s budget that is expected to be $14.3 million, lower than in previous editions of the festival but in the same range as more established festivals including the rival Venice Film Festival.

  • Octavia Spencer eyes film production

    Octavia Spencer eyes film production

    MUMBAI: Octavia Spencer, winner of the Oscar in the ‘Best Supporting Actress’ category for The Help, has made her intention clear of turning a producer.

    “I don‘t have any role that I want to play. I want to be a producer. I want to be an activist. I was to be pro-active in bringing about work for men, women, boys, girls, everybody who is good at what they do and deserve a shot,” she has been reported to have said.

    After winning the golden statuette, Spencer admitted she was ‘humbled‘ by the accolade and hoped that she could be a beacon of hope to aspiring actresses. “I‘m very humbled because I get to stand here and accept this award and I haven‘t really done anything. I hope that in some way I can be some kind of beacon of hope, especially am I am not the typical Hollywood beauty,” she observed.

    Spencer can next be seen in an yet-untitled film by Diablo Cody.

  • Dujardin not averse for second silent film

    Dujardin not averse for second silent film

    MUMBAI: Jean Dujardin who recently won an Oscar for his role in The Artist has said that he was not averse to make another silent movie if it helped his chances of succeeding in Hollywood. The French actor, who won the Best Actor award said that he has some ideas of where he wants his career to go.
     
    "I‘m not an American actor, I‘m French and I continue in France. If I could make another silent movie in America, I would. But I‘ll always be a French actor in America. Nonetheless, there are a few ideas I would like to develop," Dujardin has reportedly said.

    Saying that he had a lot of fun working on The Artist, Dujardin went on to reveal that he had researched the role by watching old movies. "It was not really intellectual, and I‘m not an intellectual.I watched a lot of movies and had fun pretending to be a movie star in 1920s," he said.