KAUFMAN - "Or cramming in sex, or car chases, or guns. Or characters learning profound life lessons. Or characters growing or characters changing or characters learning to like each other or characters overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end. Y'know ? Movie shit."
Kaufman is sweating like crazy now. Valerie is quiet for a moment - from "Adaptation".
We are all about CINEMA. That movie shit.
NOTHING is sacred.
NOBODY is spared.
Because we talk about films, dammit.
Not your sex life.
Films, fests, unsung, indies, undiscovered - all that and some fun. If you have dope on anything related to cinema or you would like to share something, do write to us at moifightclub@gmail.com.
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Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has unveiled the first set of film titles premiering in the Gala and Special Presentations programmes in this year’s edition of the fest. Three Indian films will have there world premiere at Toronto. All the three films are part of Special Presentations.
Anurag Kashyap’s latest film Mukkebaaz is titled The Brawler for the fest edition. The 145-min long film is about a lower caste boxer struggling to make his mark on the boxing world. The film stars Vineet Singh in the lead role.
Hansal Mehta’s Omerta recounts the story of infamous British-born terrorist Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who kidnapped and murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002. It stars Raj Kummar Rao in the lead and is 96 minutes long.
The third one is Bornilla Chatterjee’s The Hungry. It relocates Shakespeare’s bloody tragedy Titus Andronicus to modern-day India, where corruption, greed, and revenge run rampant at an extravagant wedding.
This year’s edition of the Mumbai Film Festival started with its opening ceremony at the restored Royal Opera House. While the re-opening of venue was the talk of the town, cinephiles were happy that two iconic filmmakers, Jia Zhangke and Sai Paranjpye, were honoured with Excellence In Cinema Awards.
Here are some snapshots from the opening ceremony of the fest.
Let the movie madness begin! See you at the movies.
(If you haven’t read, click here and here to read our recco posts on the films)
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(all pics via twitter. If you want individual credit for any pic, or want us to remove it from the post, do let us know)
There is a nice little picture of Roger Ebert (or Ebert saab, as we call him) which keeps getting featured. He is looking into the camera with his head turned, smiling, holding the Sun-Times newspaper in his hand. It has the headline, Our Ebert Won Pultizer. It’s one of those images that stays with your for eternity. That “Our” in the headline puts such a strong sense of pride and belonging. If you haven’t seen the image, click here. And that’s the inspiration for our header too.
Masaan has been doing the festival rounds since its premiere at Cannes. And it has also been bagging a lot of awards, again starting from Cannes. But National Awards has its own charm and it feels like a perfect homecoming. Neeraj Ghaywan won the Swarna Kamal for Best Debut Film Of A Director. And Varun Grover won the award for Best Lyrics, for Dum Laga Ke Haisha’s Moh moh ke dhaage. Here are some pics from the D-day.
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UPDATE – Here’s some more update from our Masaan boys. Both Neeraj Ghaywan and Varun Grover have decided to donate their cash prize towards relief work for farmers. All in their tweets.
Out of the 1.25 Lakh prize money, I will donate 50,000. Together, me and @varungrover will donate 1 Lakh rupees.
The event happened in May. And somehow we missed it. But the pictures are so priceless, we thought it would be good to share with you all. All these pictures were part of the exhibition, “The Master & I”. The event was part of Ray’s 94th birth anniversary celebration. Click here to read more about the event.
Move your cursor on any pic to get the description. And click on any pic to start the slideshow.
Neeraj Ghaywan’s debut feature Masaan (Fly Away Solo) is premiering at the ongoing Cannes Film Festival. Written by Varun Grover and starring Richa Chaddha, Sanjay Mishra, Vicky Kaushal and Shweta Tripathi, the film is competing in Un Certain regard section of the fest. Click here for the official synopsis, cast and crew list.
So after much hype (courtesy our friends Namrata Joshi, Aseem Chhabra and others), a few of us finally ended up joining them this time at the 3rd edition of the annual Dharamsala International Film Festival, up in the beautiful township of McLeodganj- and I’m happy to report that it did live up to the buzz, and I can’t wait to get up there again next year. It’s an excellently organized festival- with helpful signs all over town to guide you, autos hired to take you up to the main venue TIPA (Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts) and a wonderful, warm team of volunteers, some of who travel from various parts of India and the world to be part of this joyous little celebration of cinema up in the mountains, in a town without a single cinema theatre.
Clearly, the common thread among many of the films shown at DIFF was that they belonged to the genre I will call ‘cinema of social unrest’- and from what I hear, this was the case the year before as well. So there are many documentaries as well as fiction features about social and political movements, revolutions, human rights violation and conflicts of land, culture and identity. This feels especially apt considering Dharamshala itself is a place where you can distinctly feel the angst of displacement and the forced refugee status of Tibetans under the gentle, tranquil atmosphere of the town.
This year included a fairly interesting selection of films (you can check out the list here) as well as some interesting retrospectives, curated short film packages and masterclass/Q&A sessions with filmmakers such as Rajat Kapoor, Hansal Mehta, Gitanjali Rao, Q and Umesh Kulkarni. I’m afraid I did not manage to catch a whole lot of them- the main drawback of having a film festival in such a picturesque location is that you are conflicted whether to spend your time watching films or savor the sights around, not to mention visit all the charming cafés and eateries in the area. Still, here are a few notes on some of the films I did catch at the festival:
KILLA:
Avinash Arun’s debut feature is a gorgeously evocative and poignant film about friendship, loss and the resilient ability of children to deal with disappointment, displacement and even death. Killa is clearly a very personal film, and is shot and crafted with great love and sensitivity. It also features some unforgettable, textured characters brought to life with amazingly natural performances from Amruta Subhash, Archit Deodhar, Parth Bhalerao and a wonderful ensemble of young actors. This is yet another strong contemporary Marathi film about children, and definitely the one with most finesse out of the ones I’ve seen. I must mention here though that I haven’t seen Umesh Kulkarni’s acclaimed Vihir yet- interestingly, Avinash Arun cites Kulkarni as his mentor and a strong influence.
BRINGING TIBET HOME:
Bringing Tibet Home documents the deeply emotional and often funny story of New York-based artist Tenzing Rigdol’s audacious art project to reunite exiled Tibetans with their land, quite literally. After his father dies with his last wish of setting foot in his homeland unfulfilled, Tenzing decides that if Tibetans can’t return to Tibet, he will bring Tibet to them by smuggling 20 tonnes of native Tibetan soil to Dharamshala for a one-of-its-kind art installation. It was especially moving watching the film in Dharamshala- though it did also really make me ponder about what makes land itself so important to human beings. Maybe because I’ve never quite had roots anywhere, soil to me just feels a little overrated… ‘it’s just tiny little rocks.’
THE SQUARE:
This shattered my heart and blew my mind to bits. Jehane Noujaim’s The Square is the most devastating film I have seen in a long time and easily the best one I saw at Dharamshala. The film puts you right at the heart of a revolution inside Tahrir Square, with young, common people spiritedly fighting a fascist and fundamentalist regime in Egypt, spilling their blood and guts out for the hope of a brighter, free future even as they come to the crushing realization that courage and idealism aren’t enough to win their war against oppression. This is absolutely essential viewing- the auditorium was filled with tears and goosebumps in the end and the applause didn’t stop till the credits had finished rolling.
(PS: Also spotted in the documentary- Aida Elkashef from Ship of Theseus and a Vikramaditya Motwane doppelganger. I kid you not- the resemblance is uncanny. See if you can spot him. 😉 )
OMAR:
Director Hany Abu-Assad cleverly sets a gripping tale of love, deceit and betrayal against the Palestine-Israel conflict. The film borrows sparingly from Romeo and Juliet and Othello to give us a heady mix of socio-political thriller and Shakespearean drama-and while a comparison might be a little unfair- I can’t help feel that Omar blends the two a lot more seamlessly and effortlessly than Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider, which of course is very good in its own right. Adam Bakri gives a superbly charismatic performance as the protagonist- though admittedly, it’s hard to take your eyes off him anyway considering how jaw-droppingly good he looks.
TRUE LOVE STORY:
Filmmaker Gitanjali Rao showcased a great set of Indian and international animated shorts curated by her at DIFF (including her marvelous Printed Rainbow), and ended the session with her newest film True Love Story, which screened at the Cannes Critics’ Week section earlier this year. The film, originally scripted to be part of a feature film (alas, no one wants to fund quality animation films in India) begins as a homage to masala movies which is both affectionate and hilariously tongue-in-cheek- but in the end reveals itself to be a sharp social satire, using a real-life tragedy that made headlines a few years back (the court case is still on) to brilliant, scathing effect. The film is a visual and aural delight with its colorful evocation of Bombay’s sights and sounds through Bollywood tinted glasses, and hopefully it will make its way to a wider audience soon. And I hope some producers funding ‘indie’ films (which more often than not, turn out to be sub-par) see the potential in this medium and back Ms Rao’s extraordinary talent and bring more of her singular, unique vision to the big screen.
Danis Tanovic’s desi film Tigers starring Emraan Hashmi will have its world premiere at Toronto International Film Festival this year. Synopsis, cast & crew, and other details of the film is out.
Devastated when he discovers the effects of the infant formula he’s peddling, a young salesman challenges the system and the powers that be, in this based-on-fact drama from Academy Award-winning director Danis Tanovic (No Man’s Land).
Multinationals’ activities in the developing world come under harsh scrutiny in Danis Tanovic’s hard-hitting new drama Tigers. No stranger to controversy, the Academy Award-winning director is unafraid to stick his nose into contentious subject matter. Here, he explores Pakistan’s fascination with Western drugs, basing his film on a true story — its real-life protagonist lives in Toronto — involving a corporation aggressively trying to increase its market share through the sale of baby formula to new mothers.
Ayan (Emraan Hashmi) is a young, recently married salesman who gets a job peddling locally made drugs to pharmacies and doctors. Despite the fact that the Pakistani-manufactured pharmaceuticals he sells are much cheaper than those sold by Western competitors, no one will trust or buy products that lack major brand names. His wife encourages him to apply for a job with Lasta, a large multinational, and Ayan is hired on a trial basis. It’s not long before his natural charm and knack for glad-handing make him into a minor star, and Lasta expands his responsibilities. However, one day he is devastated to see first-hand what the selling of baby formula really means in certain cases. Shocked, Ayan sets out to challenge the system and the powers that be.
In a neat piece of narrative structuring on Tanovic’s part, this David-and-Goliath story is told partially through the eyes of a film crew making a documentary on Ayan’s astonishing findings. But the power of Tigers lies in his willingness to push his film out onto the streets of Pakistan and into the face of a system where narrow interests prevail, and an honest man doing the right thing is castigated and threatened, and finally sees his life endangered.
Cast & Crew
Executive Producer: Karen Tenkhoff, Michael Weber, Praveen Hashmi, Achin Jain
Producer: Prashita Chaudhary, Kshitij Chaudhary, Guneet Monga, Anurag Kashyap, Cedomir Kolar, Marc Baschet, Andy Paterson, Cat Villiers
Production Company: Cinemorphic Pvt Ltd, Sikhya Entertainment Pvt Ltd, A.S.A.P. Films
Principal Cast: Emraan Hashmi, Geetanjali, Danny Huston, Khalid Abdalla, Adil Hussain, Maryam D’Abo, Satyadeep Misra, Heino Ferch, Sam Reid, Supriya Pathak, Vinod Nagpal
Screenplay: Danis Tanovic, Andy Paterson
Cinematographer: Erol Zubcevic
Editor: Prerna Saigal
Sound: Anthony B J Ruban
Music: Pritam
Production Designer: Rachna Rastogi, K.K Muralidharan
Danis Tanovic was born in Zenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and attended l’Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle in Brussels. His feature films include No Man’s Land (01), which won Best Screenplay at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film; L’enfer (05) and Triage (09), both of which premiered at the Festival; and An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker (13), which screened at the Festival and won the Silver Bear at Berlin. Tigers (14) is his latest film.
Avinash Arun’s directorial debut, the Marathi feature film Killa (The Fort) will have its world premiere at the upcoming Berlinal International Film Festival. The fest runs from February 6-16, 2014.
The film is selected in the Generation Kplus competitive category. IT stars Amruta Subhash, Archit Deodhar, Parth Bhalerao and Shrikant Yadav. Avinash has also shot the film.
Official Synopsis
Killa deals with the universal conflict of migration, and how it impacts the lives of people, especially children. The story revolves around a young boy Chinu who finds it difficult to adjust to his new surroundings where he has migrated to, after his father’s death. But gradually he makes new friends and gains more confidence.
Produced by Madhukar R Musle, Ajay G Rai, Alan McAlex under the banner, Jar Pictures and presented by M R Filmworks, the film was a part of NFDC Film Bazaar’s Work-in-Progress (WIP) Lab in 2013.
There are few other Indian films at this edition of Berlin Fest. Gaurav Saxena’s Rangzen will also have its world premiere in Generation Kplus. Imtiaz Ali’s Highway and Papilio Buddha (India/USA) directed by Jayan Cherian will be screened in the Panorama section. Lajwanti (The Honour Keeper) directed by Pushpendra Singh has been selected for Berlinale Forum which is for avant garde, experimental works, essays, long-term observations, political reportage and yet-to-be-discovered cinematic landscapes. Also, Berlinale Talent Campus has selected 3 Indians – Producer Sanjay Shah, documentary filmmaker Nishtha Jain and director/screenwriter Dipesh Jain. More details here.
We have finally come to the last post of our Rewind 2013 series. If you missed our previous posts in the series, here’s the complete list – 20 Things We Learnt At The Movies and 13 Unanswered Questions is here, Top 10 Musical Gems We Discovered This Year is here, 15 Film Fanatics on 17 Terrific Films That Have Stayed With Them is here, 14 Bollywood Songs We Played in Non-stop Loop Is here, and 16 film buffs on 16 most memorable scenes of the year is here.
This one is on posters. So what is a film poster suppose to do? With so much hype around the release of first look of any film, it’s your first pitch for the audience. It might not make or break your film but it surely starts setting the mood for the film. But do they always tell what the film is all about? A good film poster is a rare thing. And recycling is the funda of the game (we recycled this para too). Click here to read an interesting piece – thirteen movie poster trends that are here to stay and what they say about their movies. And if you heart posters like we do, here‘s another interesting site for minimal movie posters.
We were trying to make at least a dozen honest movie posters. But thanks to computer crash and last minute ditch by another contributor, Varun Grover and Rakhi managed to make only these six. Enjoy. Do share if you have made any.
“Tagore-on-an-acid-trip” – that’s how Qaushiq Mukherjee, or Q, as he is popularly known, has described his latest film, Tasher Desh. We discovered Q with his last film Gandu which still remains unreleased in India. And we have been following all his work since then – shorts, music, documentaries.
Here’s the director’s note on his new film which is set to release on 23rd August in Mumbai and Kolkata. It’s based on one of the popular musical dramas of Rabindranath Tagore.
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Since I was five, Tasher Desh has been on my mind. It’s that fantasy that I always knew I wanted to touch. That elusive texture of human existence, devoid of transient truth. Reality is indeed transient; shifting all the time yet every civilization holds on to its truth till whatever time they can, always leading to antagonism and discontent. The cycle of time makes sure that periods of extreme confusion and chaos happen to alter realities, and we are at the thresholds of such a time.
Tagore wrote Tasher Desh as a mythical utopian expression against the backdrop of a violent turbulence. India was in the process of forming an individual and collective identity. Shaking off a history of oppression and forging a modern society. Tagore saw it as an opportunity perhaps, to tell a story removed so far from reality that it forced the listener to be objective. Modern society is marked by one overwhelming human condition. Of melancholia or depression. Slowly becoming one of the most important issues of our daily reality.
Depression is a symptom of a gloom caused by social system and its invariable ability to isolate individuals.
The film is not about the narrative of the fairy tale. It is but a reflection of how I see the world right now. As it was then, when the piece was written, the world is in a flux. India is changing radically, along with the politics of the world, and these changes are essentially driven by system driven violence. My storyteller, therefore, is a lost soul. Unable to deal with the cacophony of his circumstances, he dives into the fable, as if to save himself. The characters of the fairy tale are all extensions of the storyteller, and the story itself has a life of its own. Every story is the same. And it is always the telling that shifts the paradigms.
In the film, it’s his story that helps the storyteller overcome his ennui and to take a decision that would change his life.
The prince is depressed, because the storyteller is. A deep isolation caused by the sense of loss, of one’s self. Stagnant and paranoid. Stuck in a space and time that is almost a cocoon, with the appearance of a prison. While the storyteller is confined within the two parallel railway tracks, the prince is in his palace, a hopeless fortress, as it seems to him.
Tasher Desh is also about belief and magic. The oracle, the fairy watching over our prince, is needed because impetus is external. This is what connects us to the world outside our mind. Instead of drawing inspiration from the mundane reality, the storyteller as the concerned friend of his protagonist invokes the fairy. The prince’s transformation is immediate. Touched by the power of illusion, he suddenly begins to realize that his emancipation is in movement. He needs to go away. One of the most important things holding him back was his broken mother. He comes out to his mother, and then dives into his fantasy. The storyteller also jumps the wall of his reality.
It could be argued that social governance and its monotheistic, patriarchal nature cause collective depression. Tagore’s utopia is bizarre, with masked beings, strange rules and social paranoia of change. The cards in the film seem to have lost all human tendencies.
When the prince and the friend meet them. But the prince, newly liberated, is impatient to try out the power he has been given. A demi god now, devoid of intrinsic human folly, he delivers the message to the ace of hearts.
The storyteller travels the path he has often traveled in his fantasy, and when he arrives at the palace of his dreams, he finds her. The ace of hearts, a widow living in the shadows of a ruined structure. Mystical, magical, she is the one he was waiting for. Suddenly he has someone to tell the story to. Get it out of his soul. The widow and the ace of hearts merge in his story, and a revolution begins.
Tasher Desh symbolizes the triumph of a pagan form of ritualistic cleansing through love and identification of the self, in a postmodern society. it’s a vision of the man cleansed pure by the woman, and the seed of identity being sexual in nature. The ace of hearts takes away the storyteller’s attention, at the same time making his story more palpable, more intense, and more romantic. The film turns a sharp corner therefore, and begins to intensify on finding that one point, the spark. It’s a feminine revolt that the story narrates now, no longer a tale of male neurosis. A non-‐violent revolution fuelled by love. In utopia. Tagore was a pure romantic, and i have tried to place his sensibilities in the confusion of our time. a violent world without any screen violence. A fairy tale without any fabrication and frills. I have tried to find the unreal right beside me. All the art properties in the film were objects we can find easily. The locations were live. The look, inspired heavily by Japanese forms, from kabuki to manga, had to be basic. There are no visual effects used, apart from layering two or three visuals together, to find an image that allows all the realities to exist together, form a relationship. And a video game reference that was done with video moshing, a very low fi technique. The idea was minimalist. Within that apparent reality, we would try to find the sublime. The magical.
The film is a musical. Following an ancient oral form, we have retained the songs as they were, written eighty years back. Associating with some of the finest musicians across the world, I have tried to place the sound of Tagore’s time with the current ones. The words of the songs, so eloquent, emerging from a romantic poet of the highest standard, are actually lines for the characters that sing them. With the use of music, the reality is broken time and again, but every song contains a message so intrinsic to the character, one can lose one’s self in them. Sound and colour play crucial roles in the film, creating the environment and the tension of the spaces explored.
Tasher Desh is an experiment in form and structure, using one of the most popular scripts of India’s recent history. I wanted to remain as faithful to the original idea as I could, and then use my treatment to bring the seed of the story out of its stagnancy, caused by the sterility of my culture. It is a story about revolution after all, and magic, and I strongly believe in both.
A king banishes the older queen and his son to a palace where they lead a life of luxury and decadence. An oracle whispers the secret words to the prince and he leaves the palace with his friend, the merchant’s son. Their boat sinks and they arrive at the land of cards where the inhabitant cards are governed by a military regime. The prince and his friend get caught and bring about a change in the women cards with music and prophecies of love. The woman cards revolt. The king surrenders and the prince finds the meaning of life.
What’s Q’s Tasher Desh is all about
Once upon a time, there was a storyteller. In a lonely railway station, somewhere in Kolkata, he spoke to trains. He wanted to tell a story. It was not a new story. But for him, it was the only story to tell. Inside the darkness of his mind, his story unfolds, a kaleidoscope of fantasy.
Once upon a time, there was a prince. a victim of his destiny, he was banished with his mother to a dark and distant prison palace. Here he grows up, without hope, without a future, with his mother drowning herself in alcohol. His depression countered only by his friend, the merchant’s son, who argues that it was indeed the prince’s choice to remain locked in. realizing the extent of his despair, the friend invokes the oracle. A mysterious figure, the oracle passes on a message of liberation. The prince realizes that he is indeed a prisoner of his mind. He takes a decision, to leave. He has a final moment with his mother, who lets him go. The prince takes hold of his destiny, and sets off on a voyage with his friend, searching for an adventure.
The storyteller begins his journey as well, leaving the city, and traveling to a ruined palace, which is where we had found the prince. Here, he encounters a strange woman, a widow, living alone, as if waiting for him to turn up. He is mesmerized by her, and soon, begins to tell her the story. She is his muse, the one who he was waiting for. Finally having found the listener, the storyteller launches into an even more intense narrative.
Shipwrecked on a paradise island, the prince and the friend encounter a strange culture. The islanders are all soldiers, who call themselves the cards, and live by a code of rules that outlaws any human behavior. Before they know it, an aggressive party of the islanders, holds the visitors captive. Presented at court, and having angered the cards by defying their court customs, they are pronounced guilty, and banished. But before he leaves, the prince asks for a last word, and takes the opportunity to whisper the same message of liberation he received from his guardian angel to a few of the card women. The result is chaos. The women are completely shaken, and soon the land of cards sees dissent for the first time.
– For more info on the film and release schedule, click here for its FB page.
F.i.g.h.t C.l.u.b 