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At IFFLA this year, PFC finally got the chance to meet the director of two films that were highly appreciated by the critics and the audience alike. The films being OFFICE TIGERS & SHOT in BOMBAY and the director Liz Mermin.

OFFICE TIGERS was featured in 2007 and it was shown to a packed house. A docu-feature about a call-center in Chennai, the challenges, the management and people evoked very sharp and enthusiastic response so much so that the CEO of OFFICE TIGER invited for the QnA became an instant celebrity.

Mainak already did a through analysis of Shot in Bombay here and to add to it, the movie makes an instant reaction impossible to curtail through lucid story telling and attractive tit-bits into the unglamorous world behind the camera.

The following interview was conducted by TEAM PFC at the Portico of Arch Lights, LA. A big THANKS to Saurabh Dixit, the cameraman …

iView Author:Krishna
(Hyderabad, India )

Email:moviecentric [at] gmail [dot] com

Online Critics Society

The thought having an Online Critics Society came into my mind by looking at the present situation of the Indian Cinema.

Many people might be under the delusion that Indian Cinema has a good reputation outside India,sorry to say that the present Indian Cinema does not have that reputation.

When i was talking to my friend about the Indian Cinema who lives in US i came to know the downfall of standards of Indian Cinema.

Indian had produced some wonderful film makers like Satyajit Ray, Bimal Roy,Shaym Benegal,Guru Dutt,K.vishwanath etc… but do we have any hope of finding film makers mentioned above in the futre? answer is very simple and straight –NO

There are many reasons for this condition of Indian Cinema and one of the reasons is the awards.I feel …

The 54th National Film Awards for the year 2006 were announced today. The whole awards & entries list is here:

http://pib.nic.in/archieve/others/2008/jun/54th_nfa.pdf.

However, some salient features:

1. At last, Soumitra Chatterjee has won a national award for the best actor - for the Bengali film Podokkhep. In 2001, he had won a special jury award for Goutam Ghose’s Dekha, but he had declined it. That year Anil Kapoor had got the award for Pukar. The best actress award goes to Priyamani for Paruthi Veeran (Tamil).

2. Priyanandan’s Malayalam film Pulijanmam has got the best feature film award.

3. Kabir Khan’s Kabul Express (Hindi) and Madhu Kaithapuram’s Eakantham (Malayalam) share the Indira Gandhi Award for the Best First Film of a Director.

4. Lage Raho Munnabhai has won the Best Popular Film Award, best screenplay (Abhijat Joshi, Raj Kumar Hirani & Vidhu Vinod Chopra), best lyrics (Swanand Kirkire for Bande Mein Tha Dum).

5. Care of …

Sort of in between a rant and musings…

Was at the Sarkar Raj press show at Famous yesterday. Well, as expected was house full. The sixty-seater was exploding with around hundred people from the press (we have SO many reviewers amongst us and not ONE to be proud of???) with so many sitting on the floor, including yours truly.

Well, this is not the first time this has happened. I remember once last year some movie evoked a similar response. And it is when the preview halls are jam-packed that they become the best opportunity to learn something about the cult of our hallowed film journalists/reviewers. That, I felt the same vibes I felt the last time I was among the ‘intellectual elite’ of Bbay’s film-dom and media, I felt an urge to share thoughts on it.

Everyone from Taran Adarsh to Khalid Mohammed to Mayank Shekhar to, I assume, Raja Sen (I …

Hum Panchhi Ek Dal Ke. No, not the 1957 film or the 2006 one. It is a short film made this year. Just 9 minutes long, dialogue less, in colour & B&W. Directed by Manoj Srivastava, who is known more in his avatar of a Deputy Director with the Directorate of Film Festivals of Government of India in Delhi, it was one of the Indian films that were entered in the Short Film Corner section of the Cannes Film Festival this year. It was the only Indian film in the shortlist of 14 that were in the competition within the segment. The Short Film Corner section was started five years ago, to encourage filmmakers to create interesting work, and the buzz is that it could in the near future be hived off as a completely separate stand-alone festival. The prize money of Euro 10,000 and an offer from Fonds …

It’s Cannes time again. And it is time for some of our filmmakers to go and screen their films in the “market”, on space and time bought against hefty sums, outside the festival’s official sections, and then come back and claim through their PR companies – and the ‘anything goes’ media is only too happy to reproduce these claims – that their films have been “screened at Cannes”. (Closer home: would anyone claim that his or her film has been screened at IFFI if it is screened at the market section? The glamour of Cannes is to blame, I guess!)

It is these claims that prompted me to go to the Cannes website archive two years ago, and prepare an exhaustive list of all Indian films screened (in any official section) in Cannes since its first edition. Here it goes – in alphabetical order, and updating for 2007 & 2008 …