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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 …

I just returned to Mumbai after my “INDIA darshan ” as I was filming 6 documentaries for AID INDIA (Association for india’s development -an NGO) along with our very own K K (Kavita Krishna). I must thank her for offering me this opportunity and choosing me over many other volunteers (including her sis) … she was being professional she says !!!

Anyway now I am just gonna throw light on one small part of our trip in this article, but let me first give you an over view of what we were assigned to do-

Kavita proposed the idea of documenting on film the works and the projects of AID-INDIA to Kiran a volunteer of AID-USA (Kavita has been an AID volunteer since 2001) and she was given the green signal!!!

So we were given projects to cover in various parts of India (Chennai, Krishnagiri, Thiruvanamalai, Anakapalle, Srikakulam, Tholapi, …

Supriyo Sen is someone whose name is familiar to only die-hard documentary lovers in India. But make no mistake – he is one young filmmaker in India whom we will hear a lot more about in the years to come. Let’s get introduced to him here on PFC:

Sen’s can be expected to be an oft-heard name in next year’s Berlin International Film Festival. His project Wagah, which will seek to interpret the ritual of every evening’s closure of the gates on the India-Pakistan border crossing in a larger context, has been selected by the festival as one of the five concepts selected from 180 entries from across the world for cinematic celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Kolkata-based Sen’s film, to be shot in the second half of 2008, will be premiered under the special section called My Wall at the festival next year, …

India is set up to be the most creative place on earth. The diversity of its people is now being accentuated by the variety of mindsets jostling with each other for some kind of supremacy. One of the key ingredients of evolution and creativity is cross-pollination, and India is better endowed for that to happen more than any other country in the world.

Our entertainment industry is sitting on a wishing well, if only it could see things that way. But given the mindset that runs it, that also makes it also one of the most frustrating places on earth.

The level of insecurity in our entertainment industry is surprising, given that it is supposed to be a business at the end of the day. It is the money that determines what projects get made, and the thinking behind the money that forms a working culture.

But aren’t business people …

54. That is the number of films that I and two of my co-jury members watched in just five days at the 10th Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentary, Short & Animation films (MIFF). The festival was held over seven days, from February 3 to 9, but the films in the Indian competition section (in which I served on the critics jury chosen by the Indian chapter of the International Federation of Film Critics – FIPRESCI - along with Uma da Cunha from Mumbai and M K Raghabendra from Bangalore) were screened from the 4th to the 8th. Of these 40 were documentaries, nine short fiction films and five animation films. We had a tough task at hand, since we were mandated to give out only one award – I personally felt it was a great injustice to the films as we had to select the winner from among three …

iView Author:
Sourav Bhuyan
Mumbai, India

EMAIL:
souravbhuyan[at]gmail[dot]com

My Petty Effort….

Iron Maiden is coming to India for the second time and playing live at the MMRDA grounds on the 1st of February.A red letter day for Bombay metalheads.

A year back I came across a documentary called “Metal:A Headbanger’s Journey”.This documentary had taken into account the origin of this particular genre of music called Heavy Metal and stretched over lot of other issues related to it.The documentary was interspersed with interviews of metalheads all over the world and also exclusive interviews.Well documented movie I must say. Sam Dunn,the Writer and the Director of the movie is making another documentary called “Global Metal”.It takes into account the reach of this genre of music in the world.Be it Iran,Brazil,India or Malaysia.

Last year in March, Iron Maiden arrived in Bangalore and blew the city into pieces. Sam …

This surely marks a high in the Indian film festival circuit! According to an announcemnt today, Osian’s-Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema will give away over Rs 1 Crore (approx. USD 250, 000) in Prize Money for its Competition Sections and Lifetime Achievement Awards.

The festival will celebrate its 10th Anniversary in New Delhi from 10-20 July, with its Mumbai Preview preceding in June 2008.

While the Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Cinema was introduced in the 6th Osian’s-Cinefan in 2004, the Lifetime Achievement Award for Contribution to Cinema will be introduced this year, and Rs 6 lakh (approx. USD 15,000) will be presented for each category.

The Best Films in the Asian-Arab and Indian Competition sections will be awarded Rs 20 lakh each (USD 50,000) and the Best Director in each section will win Rs 8 lakh (USD 20,000).

The Special Jury Award and the Best Actor …

“In the dark depths of the nether world, for wanderers searching for the ultimate prize clues are everything”.

Oh well!! that was as cheesy as it can get..
:-)
but couldn’t resist.

Cheesiness apart, it is so subliminally true!

for all those geeks with cool names stalking the net for music, movie and the like…
(porn? Nah… porn is passé..)
everything you get is from that passing comment at a forum..
a chance chat remark…
a ‘recommended site’ link on a website purporting to have it all!!!….
all of which eggs you to the darkest part of the net in search of that treasure trove.
(see the treasure is guarded so well that it keeps changing location every week or so- think saddam being whisked away for fear of an american attack).

Its therefore supremely important to rummage around every nook and corner as you wander about..
you just might hit a trail. thats what happened here.

so there i …

The Indian Panorama for the 38th IFFI (Goa, Nov 23-Dec 3) has been just announced.

Lenin Rajendran’s “Ratri Mazha” (Night Rain) in Malayalam and Samir Chanda’s “Ek Nadir Galpo” (Story of a River) will represent India in the Asian-African-Latin American Competition section. The Panorama section will open with another Malayalam film, Shyamaprasad’s “Ore Kadal”.

The other films in Indian Panorama are B S Lingadevaru’s “Kada Beladingalu”, P R Ramdas Naidu’s “Moggina Jade” K Shivarudraiah’s “Daatu” (all Kannada), Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s “Naalu Pennungal”, Renjith’s “Kayyoppu”,
Babu Thiruvalla’s “Thaniye” (all Malayalam), Bhavna Talwar’s “Dharm”, Sameer Hanchate’s “Gafla” (both Hindi), Sanib Sabhapandit’s “Jaatingaa Ityadi” (Assamese), Mangesh Hadawale’s “Tingya”, Gajendra Ahire’s “Maai Baap”, Bipin Nadkarni’s “Aevdhe Se Aabhaal” and Vishal Bhandari’s “Kaalchakra” (all Marathi), Gnana Rajasekaran’s “Periyar” and Padma Magan’s “Ammuvagiya Naan” (both Tamil), Anjan Das’ “Jaara Brishtite Bhijechilo”, Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s “Ami, Yasin Aar Amaar Madhubala” (both Bengali), Makhonmani Mongsaba’s “Yenning Amadi Likia” (Manipuri).

The jury was headed by veteran …

The United States celebrates October 8th, as Columbus Day with a holiday, few of us are aware however that it is also the Indigenous People’s Day.
While we Indians continue to populate the land that is not ours for financial benefits, we could assuage our guilt a little if we made ourselves aware of the stories that are being silenced. In the name of English , in the name of the Dollar, in the name of Globalization and in the name of Nothing.
After all we are the Generation X and we do not care to know what came before and what will come after. We are here and now and we are ME. Only.
A little knowledge of History and a little more sensitivity would not have us scream Columbus ! Columbus!! to a peppy beat or call our Heroes HITLER and STALIN. And If I remember right GHAZINI …

In the hype surrounding the controversies relating to the 53rd National Film Awards, the mention of a special jury award to FTII graduate Vibhu Puri’s Chabi Wali Pocket Watch in the Non-Feature category almost went unnoticed. Well, the fact of the matter is, most of the awards in the Non-Feature section go unnoticed by the media these days, as both channels and newspapers concentrate on the top awards in the Feature section.

But Puri’s film, coming after his earlier film Chauras Chand, shows the definite growth of a young filmmaker who is sooner than latter going to be a sensitive director in the Hindi film industry if he holds on to the ideals he has exhibited in both his films.

Chauras Chand, which was part of the Non-Feature Section of the Indian Panorama at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) a few years ago, was on Avtaar Singh …

Writing this post as I am going through a glossy book that introduces Sudhir Mishra’s Khoya Khoya Chand and a flier on Manish Tiwari’s directorial debut dil dosti etc, both products of Prakash Jha Productions. Sudhir’s film will release on October 26, and Manish’s on September 28.

Manish Tiwari, as the flier introduces him, is a PhD from Cambridge (UK), did a post-doctoral fellowship from Yale (USA) and United Nations University (Japan). He has worked for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN in Rome, Nepal and India. His monograph, titled Participatory Forest Policies and Politics in India was published by Ashgate (UK). He has produced and directed two documentary films - Lo Manthang and Ramnagar.

Well, the director’s educational and work experience are really, really impressive, and that is why the film, which the flier says has an original story by him, should be worth waiting for if nothing …

I was looking forward to watching ‘Jashn-e-Azaadi’, the documentary by Sanjay Kak at Prithvi on the 30th and i get this email today:

“Dear Friends, We write to bring to your notice yet another violation of the freedom of expression in India. On Friday, 27 July 2007, a posse of policemen attached to the Dadar police station in Bombay broke into a private screening of Sanjay Kak’s documentary, ‘Jashn-e-Azaadi’, and confiscated the DVD. The screening, which was hosted by the Vikalp group of independent filmmakers, was intended to bring to a Bombay audience an eloquent cinematic argument for dialogue beyond anguish and antagonism; for an understanding of the ‘Kashmir issue’ in human and cultural terms. Kak’s ‘Jashn-e-Azaadi’ dwells on the experience of the Kashmiri people during the protracted period of strife they have suffered — with equal elements of militancy, State repression, criminal violence, and a struggle for self-articulation. According to …

The festival has concluded and has, like all the festivals, has left a warehouse of memories, experiences and conversations. Before I go into the films of Day Three and Four, I would like to confess that it gets telling on your reactive senses if you try to catch up with all the films, because a festival is lot more about than just films. In this particular one, they were showing films at two places, one of the regular screen, and one upstairs on Aquascope, so like they said on the opening, save the possibility for you being two places at one time, you can’t watch all the films. And while I used to doze off a little in midst of a film, I quietly used to sneak out and realize there is so much happening that you can only enjoy the moment without much planning …

With this film,Philip Groning has been compared to Vermeer. To Bresson,Trakovsky,Dreyer,Mallik and to the Dardenne bros.Doing away with cinematic trappings to such an extent that the bare soul shines through,he has been able to present the film as the subject itself instead of a ‘representation’.Watching INTO GREAT SILENCE is as good as being physically in the Grande Chartreuse,high in the French Alps.

Having formally studied medicine and psychology, he has worked as a sound assistant, prop master and assistant director before embarking on being a film maker. He has also worked as an actor and screenwriter. Philip Groning is an alumni of the MUNICH FILM SCHOOL [ HFF ]

Coming out of the theatre,Kulsoom,a Pakistani lawyer, said to me “You so totally owe me a treat, a Hindi Film. Make sure it has lots of dances with lots of costume changes!”
On the other hand Amina,a film …

This is probably the best video I’ve played with. Amazing stuff and extraordinary content. I’m talking about “Planet Earth” series. It’s among the best I’ve seen from BBC. “Space” is the other series that I liked. I’m currently watching “Long way round”, “Cosmos”, Adam Curtis’ collection (which includes “The Century of the Self” and “The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear”). I wish I had even more time. Talk about greed. I am addicted to the documentary mini-series because it is more comprehensive. And one of the addictions which I don’t mind. I can strongly say that documentaries are less time consuming than books, journals and wiki together but more ‘precise’, it’s the best informative source. You get to know different things from ‘Evolution of Universe’ to ‘roots of Consumerism’.

First, I had thoughts of making a fan video for the whole documentary Series. But …

21st Century and we are still stuck with the idea of shooting on celluloid film. Well this is true but things are
definitly changing now. If I talk about the feature length motion pictures, they are still shot on film because of numerous
reasons(we discuss later in the article), but for the documentary, indie film makers and for few others
who are not afraid of experimenting, Digital media is the buzz in the market.

Hello everyone. Lots of things are discussed here on PFC, I thought of a start with something different, yet very crucial and of much significance in the art of film making; Art of Cinematography. Cinematography is an art of movie photography, capturing frames with a film camera or in recent times, with a digital video camera. It is of much importance because everything you see with your eyes looks beautiful, but to capture that beautiful frame and projecting …

Many say that the word ‘Bollywood’ is a cheap imitation of Hollywood and thus we should avoid using the word. I have consciously and specifically chosen the word ‘Bollywood’ in the title of my post as this post is about cheap imitations of the west. A lot has been said about blatant plagiarism and dvd remakes thriving in Indian cinema and hence will not waste time upon stating the obvious. What can be of great interest though is tracing the roots of plagiarism in Hindi films and trying to get an insight on a practice which in it’s ultimate analysis is a crime. Being madly in love with films and having keen interest in the entire ’stealing’ business, I have made a documentary titled ‘Four Step Plan’ along with two of my friends which critiques the trends of plagiarism in our films. Adopting a sarcastic approach, the documentary proposes a …