Indian films, global fests
India to shine bright on the global film fests soon, writes Saibal Chatterjee.
India will, for a change, be shining bright and long on the international film festival circuit in the next two months. Cannes had cold-shouldered Indian cinema in May, but Locarno and Toronto, which host two of the world’s biggest film festivals, aren’t following suit.
India will be represented by a strong complement of films and stars at these events in August and September. While both the Locarno and Toronto film festivals will open with the world premiere of an Indian-made film, several other major features drawn from diverse streams of Indian filmmaking will be unveiled at these two festivals.
The 30th Toronto Film Festival, which runs from September 8 to 17, will open with the world premiere of Deepa Mehta’s long-in-the-making Water, the third part of a trilogy that includes Fire and 1947: Earth.
The cast of Water features John Abraham, Lisa Ray and Seema Biswas in the stellar roles, but it is listed as a Canadian production. Director Deepa Mehta, John Abraham and Lisa Ray are slated to be in Toronto for the festival’s opening night gala.
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| Rani Mukherji in Ketan Mehta's Mangal Pandey: The Rising |
Paul Mayeda Berges’ Gurinder-Chadha-scripted literary adaptation,
The Mistress of Spic
es, starring Aishwarya Rai and Dylan McDermott, will also premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.
In the prestigious World Masters sidebar, Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s latest Bengali-language film, Kaalpurush (Memories in the Mist), will create history of sorts. It is Dasgupta’s fourth film on the trot to make it to this section, which presents a selection of films by the world’s greatest directors.
Kaalpurush, which deals with the relationship between a father and son, features Mithun Chakraborty, Rahul Bose and Sameera Reddy. The stars of the films are expected to be in attendance along with the director during the screening in Toronto.
The Toronto Film Festival will also screen two debut films from India, Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam’s Dreaming Lhasa and Shonali Bose’s Amu, in the Discovery and Contemporary World Cinema sections respectively.
A month earlier and across the Atlantic Ocean, the Locarno Film Festival, to be held from August 3 to 13, will kick off with the world premiere of Ketan Mehta’s Mangal Pandey: The Rising, a Rs 35-crore production top lined by Aamir Khan.
The film will also compete for the festival’s top prize, the Golden Leopard, along with another Indian entry, Rituparno Ghosh’s Antarmahal, starring Abhishek Bachchan, Soha Ali Khan and Jackie Shroff.
Aamir Khan, Rani Mukherjee, Toby Stephens, director Ketan Mehta and producer Bobby Bedi will represent Mangal Pandey: The Rising at the opening night screening. Interestingly, Aamir Khan’s last film, Lagaan, too, had begun its global journey in Locarno, where it went on to win an audience award.
The 58th Locarno Film Festival will see another Indian – actress and filmmaker Aparna Sen – playing a significant role. She is a member of the festival jury headed by famed Italian painter and printmaker Valerio Adami. The jury includes Iranian actress-filmmaker Niki Karimi and hotshot Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang.
It is indeed a rare double whammy for Indian cinema: never before in living memory have two feature films from the country been accorded the singular honour of opening two major international festivals in such quick succession.
While this development may be a reinforcement of the widely held belief that Indian cinema is growing in stature worldwide, it might make sense to remember that neither of these two films, despite known Bollywood names in their credits, has emerged from the mainstream framework of Bollywood.
Both Mangal Pandey: The Rising and Water are films designed essentially for global consumption. While both have been made with significant international participation, they are for intents and purposes Indian films. They have followed a pretty simple credo: act Indian, think global.
The fact that these efforts have been rewarded so handsomely by two major film festivals – one the most influential in North American, the other the second oldest in the world – is yet another vindication that the new strategy of marrying Indian content with a global vision might be worth pursuing to its logical end.
