The Venice Film Festival will honour India’s Mani Ratnam with its Glory to the Filmmaker Award.
The oldest movie Festival in the world that takes place on the picturesque Lido
Island, off Venice, this year from September 1, will also screen his latest work,
Raavan and
Raavanan, both in its Hindi and Tamil versions. The Venice Festival director, Marco Mueller, announced this here at Cannes.
Ratnam’s film, produced by Reliance Big Pictures, is being promoted as “pan-Indian”. To be distributed by IM Global, it opens worldwide on June 18. Venice will be its Festival premier, and Amit Khanna of Reliance Big Pictures told me yesterday, “Raavan is a great work. You would never have seen anything like this before. It is far superior to Mani’s Nayagan. Technology has improved vastly since he shot the Kamal Hassan starrer in 1987”.
Venice screened three Indian movies last year, Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D and Gulaal and Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Delhi 6. They all played in the Festival’s sidebars, not in the main Competition. Ratnam’s work will also feature in a sidebar.