MAMI 22, 01: Priyanka Chopra Jonas new Chairperson, Festival in March 2022, No international competition Mumbai Academy of Moving Image has unveiled plans for 2021-22. The blueprint for the next film festival will feature new leadership and a new creative vision that is attuned to the radical changes the world has witnessed in the last two years. Taking over the reins as Chairperson is actor, producer and author Priyanka Chopra Jonas. She was unanimously nominated by MAMI’s Board of Tru...

New Amazon Prime series remembers The Forgotten Army While Mahatma Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was leading a non-violent agitation against India’s British rulers, Netaji Subhashchandra Bose headed an army, the Indian National Army (INA/Azad Hind Fauj) outside India, an army that battled colonial forces on the Singapore-Thailand-Myanmar route and reached India’s North-Eastern Border, near Imphal, before being pushed back and defeated. Bose himself is reported to have died in an air...

Erosactivity gets into top gear, announces 50 films, 40+ directors on board The next financial year for their India econ0my is 01 April 2017-31 March 2018, and at 50 productions in the pipeline, they will have almost every week at the box office covered. It’s a multilingual black-board, and includes wiz-kid Aanand L Rai and their joint production entity, Colour Yellow Production, Viki Rajani's NextGen Films, and Trinity Pictures, Eros’ in-house franchise label. Commenting o...

IFFI Goa 2015, Festival Diary, III Diary pages have got juggled, inadvertently, so, though numbered III, this page should have been IV. Please excuse the oversight and treat this as IV. Although posted earlier, IV is actually III. Austerity is the name of the game, mismanagement is the characteristic and continuing hostility towards media, and, in some cases, delegates too, are factors that dominate IFFI Goa 2015. A circus called the Film Bazaar, organised by the National Film Development Co...

MFF 17, by Jio-MAMI, Festival Diary, III For me, MFF 17 began on 31st October, with Star India’s Movie Mela (Fair), India's first movie carnival, where, over the whole day, a reported two thousand movie fans and celebrities tuned-up. The event was open to all delegates and was held at Mehboob Studios, in Bandra, founded by one India’s greatest ever film-makers, Mehboob Khan. It was kicked off with a session by director Rajkumar Hirani (Munnabhai, 3 Idiots, PK) and his writer,...

Phantom, Review: RAW-hide Rambo Saif Ali Khan comes in for Salman, Katrina stays put, so do the London locales and the secret agent assassin theme, as director Kabir Khan tries to go one up on his last outing in the genre, Ek Tha Tiger (2012). He has claimed that Tiger was unrealistic, whereas Phantom is close to reality. That claim is highly debatable. Phantom is indeed inspired by real and devastating, events that wreaked terror in Mumbai, in November 2008, killing 167 persons. That does ma...

  CAIRO ¬ The joke going around Cairo today is that the Algerian Tribute in the city's international film festival will be withdrawn if the Algerian football team beats Egypt in this Saturday's crunch game. It is only a joke, but the fact is that even the most ardent of Egypt's film buffs are focused on the crucial world cup qualifier that will see one or the other country through to the World Cup finals in South Africa next year. Punters have commented that the orga...