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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As part of our Mumbai Film Festival coverage, we will also be running previews of some of the interesting and lesser known films. This is the first post in the series.
‘The Train Leaves At Four’ is a docu-fiction film of about 57 minutes. The film was shot with a family belonging to the ‘Baiga’ tribe, living in remote Madhya Pradesh. The film has been written and directed by Antariksh Jain.
Official Synopsis
As Lamu packs his sack to migrate towards the city to work along with the labour contractor, his aging mother grieves in silence. Even her other two sons are not around to console her.
While the eldest is working on the field, the youngest has set out early this morning towards the government office. He hopes to be employed in the village itself. Those hopes are soon shattered though and he is left overwhelmed. Much of what goes on in the government office – the official paperwork, the government schemes is lost in translation.
By the evening, as Lamu waits for the train to arrive, the contractor’s condescending attitude and stinginess already makes it clear that he has signed up for a disaster, and it is too late for him to go back.
Meanwhile, crestfallen and influenced by his brother, the youngest too confronts his mother and expresses a desire to leave for the city.
MFF Screening
Fri, 30‐Oct – PVR ECX Screen 4 – 11:15 AM
Sun, 01 ‐ Nov Phoenix Screen -3 – 7:15 PM
Manu Warrier’s debut feature Coffee Bloom is having its India premiere at the Mumbai Film Festival 2014 in the ‘New Faces of Indian Cinema’ section. Coffee Bloom stars Arjun Mathur, Sugandha Garg and Mohan Kapoor among others. We have the debut trailer for the film right here, take a look:
Here is the synopsis of the film, along with information on the cast and crew:
SYNOPSIS:
Dev sells his family coffee estate as a statement underlining his renunciation of the world. When his mother dies heartbroken, he vows to prove worthy of her before scattering her ashes, little realizing that that involves confronting the world he shunned and his turbulent past.
Co-Producers: Sharath Parvathavani, Rajeev Acharya, Nitin Chandrachud, Tess Joseph
Music and BG score: Prasad Ruparel
Cinematography: Yogesh Jaan
Editor: Anand Subaya
Casting By: Tess Joseph
Sound Design: David Stevens
If you are attending MFF 2014, you can catch the film at 3:30 pm on Monday, October 20th at Cinemax Infiniti Mall, Versova and 10 am on Tuesday, October 21st at PVR Citi Mall, Andheri.
Sange Dorjee Thongdok’s Crossing Bridges is all set to release in Mumbai, Delhi, Pune and Bangalore on 29 August, via PVR Director’s Rare. It’s the first feature film ever to be made in Shertupken, a dialect and tribal community from Arunachal Pradesh. It previously showed at the Mumbai Film Festival and Dharamsala Film Festival where it was warmly received. Here’s the synopsis and trailer of the film:
Tashi, a man in his early thirties is forced to come back to his village in the remote northeast region of India after eight years when he loses his job in the city. As he stays in the village waiting for a new job in the city to go back to, he experiences the life and culture of his native place and his people, which he never paid attention to before. As he rediscovers love, friendship and his roots, when Tashi gets the news that he has found himself a new job in the city, he must decide whether to go away or stay back home for good.
You can read more about Crossing Bridges in these interviews with director Sange Dorjee Thongdok (here and here) and DOP Pooja Gupte.
PVR Director’s Rare & HumaraMovie are presenting the short film festival/anthology Shuruaat Ka Interval, which includes 8 shorts from various filmmakers, chosen and mentored by filmmakers Imtiaz Ali, Vikramaditya Motwane, Anand Gandhi & Vikas Bahl. Shortlisted candidates had access to script consultants- Bijesh Jayarajan (Yudh), Ritesh Shah (Kahaani,D Day, City Lights), Rajashree ‘urf’ Raju and Kshiti Nijhawan Agrawal. They also had access to Mukesh Chhabra and his team for casting.
All the films are based on one theme: ‘Interval’, which has been interpreted in a different, unique way by each filmmaker. Watch the trailer and read the synopsis of each short film below:
SYNOPSES of the Short Films:
1. August by Shishir Jha: Good and Evil, Yin and Yang… The continuous dichotomy of life. The path is not always a choice. A subtle interpretation of this paradox. Does the butcher only kill?
2. The Last Audition by Krishan Hooda: Anand Kumar is a struggling actor consumed by the struggle. The attempt to land a role, and the effects of the audition take over his life. He live, breathes, sleeps this process. In this obsessed role, does Anand land himself the ticket to stardom? Or does this obsession lead to his ruin? A dark tale of one’s life when you cannot differentiate life and camera!
3. No Exit by Ankit Tripathi: Is life a burden? Is memory the only thing which binds us together? Is that the reason for our misery? Cycle of life and death- is there an exit option?
4. Ayan by Amrit Raj Gupta: In the best traditions of farce- what happens when your main character disappears during the interval of a play. Do you rework the play? Can you rework the play? How do the other characters react? A laugh fest when the characters of Ramayan become real backstage.
5. Interval 3D by Palash Vaswani: What happens when a character from a Ramsay Brothers-style B Grade horror flick meets the audience? Shock, awe, funny- a ridiculous scenario from which you can only laugh your way out!
6. Bubbles and Stars by Rukhshana Tabassum: If the characters of a play were to indulge in their reverie, would their interactions be meaningful? Shot completely in black & white, a beautiful tale which reminds you of films of the silent era and what actually makes us love films
7. Final Interval by Aarti Bagdi: This is the story of a housewife, a mother, a mother-in-law, a grandmother, a superwoman. She binds the extended family together. And she needs a break!
8. Gatekeeper by Atanu Mukherjee:Gatekeeper revolves around the life of a man who guards a railway crossing. His only source of excitement in life is watching the trains passing by. Is there something which intrudes in this monotony? Or can this monotony be enjoyable?
Shuruaat Ka Interval releases in select cinemas in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Pune on 15 August, 2014.
As we have said before, it’s a great time for desi documentaries. And while this one is not an Indian production, it does have a desi connection. Amma & Appa is a personal documentary about the cross-cultural marriage of director Franziska Schoenenberger and her fiancé and co-director Jayakrishnan Subramaniam. It was warmly received when it showed recently at the Berlin Film Fest in the Perspektive Deutsches Kino section. Check out the trailer and synopsis below:
Franziska comes from Bavaria and is in love with Jayakrishnan from southern India. When the couple decide that their love should lead to marriage and a life in Germany, both sets of in-laws find that cultural customs they took for granted are now suddenly subjected to scrutiny.
Whilst Franziska’s parents chose to marry of their own free will, the marriage of Jayakrishnan’s parents was arranged within their own caste, as is customary in Caddalore in southern India. As far as they are concerned, their son’s intention not only to marry a foreigner but to marry for love represents a cruel act of revenge on the part of the gods, since the match calls into question their whole traditional way of life.
Hoping to overcome cultural barriers, the parents of the Bavarian bride-to-be decide to travel to India to visit their future son-in-law’s parents. Interspersed with delicate animation sequences, Amma & Appa is a personal documentary which tells the story of one intercultural union — and in doing so humorously explores the familiar in the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar in the familiar.
For more info on the film, check out the FB page or the website.
A brand-new teaser for director-cinematographer Santosh Sivan’s new film Ceylon (Inam in Tamil) has launched online. We don’t have details on the plot currently, but the film reportedly revolves around the lives of teenagers in an orphanage against the backdrop of war-torn Sri Lanka.
It’s an interesting, unconventional first look for the film, which doesn’t showcase any of the characters just yet, and instead chooses to show the destruction of war juxtaposed against nature, something Sivan is known to capture beautifully. Take a look:
The film stars Saritha, Karunaas, Sugandha Ram among others. Here are some of the crew details:
Over to our MusicMan Rohwit for some saturday musings.
After a near disastrous season 1 and an ‘almost’ salvaging Season 2, Coke Studio At MTV is back with Season 3. This time the season boasts of big names like A R Rahman, Papon and Amit Trivedi. Other musicians include the very talented Ram Sampath, Salim- Sulaiman, Hitesh Sonik and Clinton Cerejo.
We all know that big names do not cut much if they aren’t used well. Still, below is what we know for sure.
7 episodes with one composer each, out of which 6 episodes have 6 songs and 1 episode has 5.
Last episode with 6 different producers/bands putting up one song each.
47 songs in the season.
No composer gets repeated across episodes.
Some vocalists get repeat episodes including Kailash Kher (please innovate this time?) and Vijay Prakash who feature as singers on more than one episode.
Some musicians of the band including (but not limited to) Warren, Rushad, Jarvis, Darshan, Lindsay, Sanjoy Das and Tapas get featured in more than one episode.
Even the website this time round has a complete feel to it and that’s a good thing.
We don’t know the full details of who all will collaborate with Amit Trivedi and AR Rahman. The ‘Zariya’ video with Ani Choying Drolma and Farah Siraj was just splendid to say the least! The arrangement, the fusion and the overall presentation didn’t lack anything.No one was posing for the camera and the lights weren’t distracting at all. Gushfest allegations aside, my heart raced at around 6:32 minutes when Farah air-removes the evil eye on A R Rahman to which he smiles.
It would be exciting to see the collaboration and presentation this season because the buzz has gone into almost an overkill with too many youtube ‘session videos’ around. Amidst all the names, what intrigues (and quite frankly scares us a little bit) is the inclusion of Salim-Sulaiman and it is not because of the composers, it is because of the bollywood fest the season 1 turned out to be. We certainly aren’t looking at a long session of ‘Shukran allah’ from the composers and hope they are aware of it. We love everything about the folk that is Rajasthani and Punjabi. Still, there is much more left to be explored (even within Rajasthani and Punjabi) and may be they will present it to us.
There isn’t just one way to present ‘fusion’. While our neighbours have raised the bar very high in a quiet and understated manner, we hope that season 3 gives us a little more of music and a little less ‘hype’ around the names. Showcasing talent from across the regions and that too melodiously, is what Coke Studio is all about and if after the end of Coke Studio India season 3, we remember fondly at least 7 new singers and some genres that we were unaware of previously (Thanks to excessive bollywood-ized in-take of music), we think the job of musically erasing season 1 completely from our minds would have been accomplished.
Trivia – Last year, in this interview, Rohail Hyatt (the creator of Coke Studio Pakistan) hinted at a joint presentation of India-Pakistan artists in a Coke Studio India Session. Whatever happened to that?
Still. NO. FREE. DOWNLOADS.
WHY?
So what are your expectations from this season of desi Coke Studio?
Filmmaker Ashvin Kumar is ready with his new film titled Inshallah,Kashmir: Living Terror. He shared the preview of the film and posted this message on his FB wall recently –
We will bypass the Indian censor board and will be releasing the full-film online and free-of-charge for 24 hours at 12am, 26th of January 2012, India’s Republic Day.
The film contains shocking, heart-wrenching stories of the effects of brutality and terror by Indian armed forces and militants alike.
Click on the play button and do watch it. We are eagerly looking forward to its online premiere.
If you follow this blog regularly, you must have read a post on the indie film Kshay. If you haven’t, do click here to check out its interesting trailer and synopsis.
We have now been offered a preview of the soundtrack of the film. We are embedding two tracks here. Do check it out. We would like to know your feedback, so scroll down and use the comment box.
Kshay OST – Home
Kshay OST – Everywhere
And if you like the tracks, here’s some more dope on the music from the film’s production notes…
Music for Kshay has been done by director Karan Gour and Siddharth Bhatia. For the music, both Siddharth and Karan knew that we couldn’t be using electronic samples, which would be the independent way to go. We needed a little more character than that to help support the film’s imagery. We narrowed down on a string quartet and a harp, but that would be far too expensive to record in a studio. Hence, we managed to get some more cash together and bought the Vienna String collection off their website which consisted of brilliantly recorded solo strings that could be manipulated in various ways to match a natural, textural string composition. Both of them did their own versions of the movie and we actually had 2 soundtracks for the movie. The final soundtrack was a mix of both the composition types, although it went through a lot more evolution than just that, taking about 3 months to complete.
F.i.g.h.t C.l.u.b 