Pusan film fest to aid 3 Indian films
Three films from India– one complete and two planned – have been selected by the Pusan International Film Festival for its programmes targeted at helping independent Asian filmmakers.
Paris-based Partho Sen-Gupta’s Arunoday (Sunrise) is the only Indian entry among 30 selected from all over Asia for the Pusan Promotion Plan (PPP) project market, designed to help them find co producers and financiers. The 30 were selected from among 200-plus entries received.
Some of us might have seen Partho’s earlier (and first) film Hawa Aaney Dey (Let the Wind Blow), which was partly funded by Fonds Sud of the French Cultural Ministry.
The Arunoday website gives the synopsis as thus:
“In Mumbai, Inspector Joshi is sent to investigate the kidnapping of a street child. As he searches for clues, he meets a six year old boy named Manu. Joshi is strangely drawn to the boy. He starts visiting him, trying to befriend him but is accused of indecency and suspended by his superiors. Then Manu goes missing too.
A six year old boy is brought to a brothel. He is entrusted to Komal, a teenage prostitute. Slowly, Komal and the young boy become friends, living a childlike existence amidst the horror that surrounds them.
Out on a limb, Joshi stakes out a shady hotel. A man arrives, dragging a young boy behind him. Joshi watches from his hiding place before deciding to follow them inside.”
Delhi-based Jahar Kanungo, whose first film Nishabd – Reaching Silence (in Bengali) was also partly funded by Fonds Sud, is the second Indian filmmaker from India that has been selected by PIFF. His feature Half Truth will be part of the Independent Feature Script and Project Development Fund of the festival.
Kanungo is not yet ready to give out the synopsis, and only says, “My story is about fiction and reality. Is fiction a manipulation of truth?” The film will be a thriller. Nishabd was an interesting take on noise pollution, but completely unlike Jaideep Varma’s upcoming Hulla. In it, a young man escapes from the city to escape the noise but when he stays in the village in Bengal for long, his mind goes haywire because he is not used to so much silence!
The third Indian selection is Rajesh Shera’s Ocean of the Old Man, which has been selected for Independent Feature Post-production Fund.
The Tom Alter-starrer is a rare film to be shot in the Andamans (I remember Priyadarshan’s Kalapani). It is about a teacher in a school located on a small island, its students coming to study from nearby islands. Everything changes after the 2004 Tsunami strikes the island – the school is rebuilt and all barring five return. And the teacher goes in a search of the missing students.
Tags: Arunodaya, Half Truth, Jahar Kanungo, Nishabad, Old Man of an Ocean, Partho Sengupta, Rajesh Shera
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
wow… some real good stories here!
Tom Alter bhai wala film dekhna padega!!!