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Friday, April 20-----The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in association with the Indo-American Arts Council (IAAC), will present INDIA NOW, the first in what is meant to be an annual exhibition of feature and short films from a new generation of Indian filmmakers. For its inaugural year, the series will present nine new feature films and two short films, most of them New York theatrical premieres. The series, which is designed to spotlight the wide range of fiction and documentary styles and genres evident in India today, runs from April 22 to 30, and will screen in the Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters at the Museum of Modern Art.

The series opens with the 2005 film PARZANIA, directed by Rahul Dholakia, who will be present. This humanistic film explores the 2002 pogrom organized by radical Hindus against Muslims in the west Indian state of Gujarat that resulted in the deaths of more than 1,100 people. Dholakia, a native of Gujarat now living in Los Angeles, was inspired to make the film as a powerful humanist statement against fundamentalist extremism, which is also effective as a gripping drama.

Other filmmakers introducing their work include Arindam Mitra, whose SHOONYA (2002) follows a star cricket player into the corrupt world of professional sports gambling; and Anjan Dutt, whose Bengali social satire THE BONG CONNECTION (2006), follows the parallel stories of two young Indian men who have difficulty adjusting to their new lives in America. The series also includes two Bollywood hits: Dibakar Banerjee’s Capraesque comedy KHOSLA KA GHOSLA (2006), about a middle-class family man from Delhi who sinks his entire life savings into a suburban plot on which to build his dream house, only to be swindled by a greedy land shark; and Vishal Bhardwaj’s OMKARA (2006), a richly operatic modern-day adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello.

Although this series showcased only a handful of more than 1000 features produced every year in India (everything from Bollywood blockbusters to intimate “art films” ), the hope is introduce the newest generation of innovative Indian filmmakers to a wider audience and to possibly promote a wider distribution of the films in the United States. MoMA shares this initiative with the Indo-American Arts Council (IAAC), a not-for-profit arts organization dedicated to promoting, showcasing and building an awareness of Indian artists in the performing, literary, visual, and folk arts. For further information on this series, visit the MoMA website: www.moma.org or the IAAC website: www.iaac.us

Sandy Mandelberger, Film New York Editor