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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 …

There are five Indian films in one of the sections of Cannes this time, after all. All in the Short Film Corner section, which is one of the side-bar sections of the festival.

This, apart from Vijay Anand’s Guide which is being screened in the Classic section.

The five films, to be screened in the Short Film Corner section. are Hum Panchhi Ek Daal Ke (Of Haves and Havenots, 9 mins) in the Experimental Documentary sub-section, written & directed by Manoj Srivastava (currently a deputy director with the Directorate of Film Festivals in New Delhi), In the Land of the Nagas (30:05 mins) in the Documentary sub-setion, directed by Jaishankar Singh, Akela (Alone, 7:13 mins) in the experimental fiction sub-section (It’s an India-France-Singapore co-production), directed by Alka Mehta, Retirement (5:30 mins) by Tushar Joshi, and Viva Sunita! (3:45 mins) by Amitabh Sinha and Lolita Sarkar, in the fiction sub-section.

The Cannes …

Michael Jackson did not sing his famous song “Dangerous” keeping Charles Shobhraj in his mind but dangerous word has become synonymous with the name of Charles Shobhraj.

Charles Shobhraj has been one of the most infamous international criminal since 1970s.

As per news a film is going to be made on the life of Charles Shobhraj and Sanjay Dutt has to play the role of a suave criminal.

After playing the simple, golden-hearted Munnabhai, Bollywood top star Sanjay Dutt is set to metamorphose into a cold, calculating serial killer - a la Charles Shobhraj in a film called ‘Charles and I’.

Made by People Pictures, the racy thriller will be helmed by ace director Prawaal Raman and tells the story of the enigmatic French criminal of Indian and Vietnamese origin who sent the …

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 …