Showing posts with label 41st Toronto Film Festival. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 41st Toronto Film Festival. Show all posts
Anand Gandhi's film on Aam Aadmi Party's rise to be premiered at Toronto International Film Festival
7:51 AM
Ship of Theseus director Anand Gandhi returns to the Toronto Film Festival with a drama which traces Arvind Kejriwal's political journey
Avinash Lohana (MUMBAI MIRROR; August 10, 2016)
Four years after Anand
Gandhi's directorial debut, the National Award winning Ship of Theseus,
premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), the
filmmaker is set to return to the prestigious fest. An Insignificant Man
directed by Khushboo Ranka who co-wrote Ship of Theseus, and Vinay
Shukla who featured in it as Charvaka, and produced by Gandhi,
chronicles the rise of current Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal from
a social activist to a controversial political figure. The non-fiction
political drama ends with the elections and will not cover Kejriwal's
tenure as CM. It will premiere at TIFF this September.According to Gandhi, the idea for the 95-minute film, distilled from 400 hours of real behind-the-scenes footage shot over a year, originated from “filtered“ news surrounding the 'India Against Corruption' movement a few years ago that culminated in Kejriwal founding the Aam Aadmi Party in November, 2012. “Khushboo and Vinay were keen on understanding the inner workings of the party offices so they picked up their cameras, along with a few assistants, and moved to Delhi to follow its key members, Kejriwal and Yogendra Yadav,“ the 35-year-old filmmaker informed Mirror.
He also reveals that it was his own desire to understand the country's political system that inspired him to back the film. “I wanted to deconstruct the political procedures to distill that material into a simple, understandable film which could further con tribute to the discourse. TIFF is special for me because it completely changed the course of my debut feature. I hope the new film does better than that,“ he says.
Financed by India's biggest crowd-funding campaign for a film supported by nearly 800 people, An Insignificant Man delves into AAP's closed-door meetings, in-fighting, and the very public walk-outs. “Besides its transparent tone, it's also a procedural film that shows how a group of people form a political party and can come to power. Watching the raw footage was enlightening even for me,“ Gandhi says, adding that he wishes to make more such films with Khushboo and Vinay.
Chandan Roy Sanyal's Tope to have its world premiere at Toronto International Film Festival
7:45 AM
Natasha Coutinho (MUMBAI MIRROR; August 1, 2016)
Buddhadeb Dasgupta's
bilingual, Bait in English and Tope in Bengali, will also have its world
premiere at The Toronto International Film Festival. Chandan Roy Sanyal
who plays the lead in this film shot in Purulia in West Bengal last
year, recalls that he was in Venice when he got a call from the
director's daughter requesting a narration on Skype. “Since the film is
about human evolution, I'm mostly on a tree befriending monkeys,“ he
laughs.
Shooting with animals isn't easy and Chandan ended up spending long hours on the tree. If the monkeys shifted from their mark, it was a retake. "You cant control animals beyond a point,“ he reasons.
The effort has paid off. After the premiere at Toronto, Bait will travel to the Busan film fest and then BFI London International Film Festival: “It gave me the opportunity to work with a director who's a respected poet and activist. This is the seventh time his film is being screened at TIFF,“ adds the actor
Shooting with animals isn't easy and Chandan ended up spending long hours on the tree. If the monkeys shifted from their mark, it was a retake. "You cant control animals beyond a point,“ he reasons.
The effort has paid off. After the premiere at Toronto, Bait will travel to the Busan film fest and then BFI London International Film Festival: “It gave me the opportunity to work with a director who's a respected poet and activist. This is the seventh time his film is being screened at TIFF,“ adds the actor
Tannishtha Chatterjee to hobnob with Nicole Kidman, Dev Patel at Toronto International Film Festival
7:44 AM
It's a sixth outing for the Indian actress as her film Lion premieres at TIFF
Roshmila Bhattacharya (MUMBAI MIRROR; August 1, 2016)
Come September and
Tannishtha Chatterjee will be at the Toronto International Film Festival
for the sixth time. Last year, she had two world premieres there,
Parched and Angry Indian Goddesses, and the year before, her
Indo-Canadian film, Siddharth, was unveiled there. Before that she went
with the German film, Shadows of Time (2005), the British drama Brick
Lane (2007) and Dev Benegal's Road Movie (2009). This time she'll walk
the red carpet for the Hollywood biggie
Lion, also featuring Nicole Kidman, Dev Patel, Rooney Mara, Nawazuddin
Siddiqui and Deepti Naval. After its world premiere in Toronto, the
Saroo Brierley biopic, based on his memoir, A Long Way Home, will be
released in the US by The Weinstein Company on November 25. “I couldn't
be there for the premiere of the British historical drama, Anna
Karenina, in 2012, I won't miss going this time,“ she asserts.
In
2005, a naive Tannishtha, then in her early twenties, had gone to her
first fest with her mother's sari and some jeans and Tees. Now, a
festival regular, she's in talks
with her designer friends for a contemporary Indo-Western fusion, teamed
with Indian jewellery and fabric.
When she'd gone to Canada with
Brick Lane, Tannishtha had partied with Hollywood A-listers like Sean
Penn, Jude Law and Daniel Day Lewis. This time she's looking forward to
meeting Nicole there. The Australian actress plays Saroo's adoptive
Australian mother. “She was supposed to shoot with us in Kolkata where
we shot in real locations. Dev was there, but for some reason Nicole
couldn't come down so this will be our first interaction,“ she reveals.
Directed by another Australian Garth Davis, the film traces the journey of Saroo who at the age of five he is separated from his biological mother when, while playing hide-and-seek with his brother, he hops on to a train and is transported to Kolkata. Alone and lost on the streets, he's taken in by an NGO and subsequently adopted by an Australian couple who take him out of India. Two decades later, he traces his family using Google Earth. The young Saroo is played by Sunny Pawar who grows up to be Dev Patel. All the other actors, including Nicole, play characters who come into his life at different points.
Tannishtha who was shooting another film in Australia got a touching email from Garth appreciating her work and telling her that when he decided to make a film set in India, he created a part she'd never played before and was hopeful she'd accept it. “Every character is based on the book, so is mine, but Garth has given it a special twist. It would reveal a secret so I can't talk too much about it. During the shoot in Kolkata, when we were in character no one recognised us, but when we stepped out of our trailer, we got a lot of attention,“ smiles the actress who has been promoting her upcoming film, UnIndian, with Aussie fast blowler Brett Lee all of last week. “Even though it's his first full-fledged role, he's done ads and a music video and is a natural born actor rather than a sports star, charming and funny“.
In
2005, a naive Tannishtha, then in her early twenties, had gone to her
first fest with her mother's sari and some jeans and Tees. Now, a
festival regular, she's in talks
with her designer friends for a contemporary Indo-Western fusion, teamed
with Indian jewellery and fabric.When she'd gone to Canada with
Brick Lane, Tannishtha had partied with Hollywood A-listers like Sean
Penn, Jude Law and Daniel Day Lewis. This time she's looking forward to
meeting Nicole there. The Australian actress plays Saroo's adoptive
Australian mother. “She was supposed to shoot with us in Kolkata where
we shot in real locations. Dev was there, but for some reason Nicole
couldn't come down so this will be our first interaction,“ she reveals.Directed by another Australian Garth Davis, the film traces the journey of Saroo who at the age of five he is separated from his biological mother when, while playing hide-and-seek with his brother, he hops on to a train and is transported to Kolkata. Alone and lost on the streets, he's taken in by an NGO and subsequently adopted by an Australian couple who take him out of India. Two decades later, he traces his family using Google Earth. The young Saroo is played by Sunny Pawar who grows up to be Dev Patel. All the other actors, including Nicole, play characters who come into his life at different points.
Tannishtha who was shooting another film in Australia got a touching email from Garth appreciating her work and telling her that when he decided to make a film set in India, he created a part she'd never played before and was hopeful she'd accept it. “Every character is based on the book, so is mine, but Garth has given it a special twist. It would reveal a secret so I can't talk too much about it. During the shoot in Kolkata, when we were in character no one recognised us, but when we stepped out of our trailer, we got a lot of attention,“ smiles the actress who has been promoting her upcoming film, UnIndian, with Aussie fast blowler Brett Lee all of last week. “Even though it's his first full-fledged role, he's done ads and a music video and is a natural born actor rather than a sports star, charming and funny“.
Konkona Sen Sharma's A Death In The Gunj to have its world premiere at Toronto Film Festival
8:39 AM
Roshmilla Bhattacharya (MUMBAI MIRROR; July 28, 2016)
Konkona Sen Sharma's directorial debut, A Death In The Gunj, will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in the Special Presentation Section. "It's a great honour and I'm really excited. I was thrilled to get this beautiful email from Cameron Bailey (artistic director of the festival). It was like 'OMG! Somebody understands my film.' When I was writing it, I was so nervous and apprehensive, convinced that nobody would give me the money to make it," laughs Konkona who debuted as a director in 2006 at the Kala Ghoda Film Festival with her short film Naamkoron.
The script, penned by the two-time National Award-winning actress (Mr & Mrs Iyer, Omkara) herself, was one of the nine shortlisted by the National Film Development Corporation of India for their Script Lab and mentored by creative director Marten Rabarts. Konkona who is hard put to categorise her first feature as a director, says, "It's a human drama, a story of a family from Kolkata visiting retired parents settled in McCluskiegunj over a span of seven days," she says.
It revolves around Shyamal Chatterjee (Vikrant Massey), aka Shutu, a shy student who uses a road trip to the old Anglo-Indian town now in Jharkhand as an escape from his failed semester. In the week that follows, his quiet unravelling is initially overlooked by the family revellers, until the holiday ends with an implosion. "There's a lot of me in the film which is an amalgamation of personal experiences. It's a world I have grown up in. I spent a lot of my childhood in McCluskiegunj and there was a strong feeling of nostalgia while making the film," she admits.
McCluskiegunj, the Anglo-Indian Utopia that took birth with 300 families in the 1930s, began to fade by the late '70s with only 30 of the families remaining while others, post Independence, migrated to bigger cities, and some abroad, in search of better prospects, leaving the town to its original tribal inhabitants. Like the two marginalised groups— the Anglo-Indians and the Adivasis—who struggle to integrate with mainland India, the protagonist Shutu too, while belonging to neither, finds himself increasingly alienated from his own world.
Produced by Honey Trehan and Abhishek Chaubey who are making their debut as producers, and presented by Ashish Bhatnagar and Vijay T Swami, the film was wrapped up in just 31 days, an impossible task for most Bollywood filmmakers. "But this is not a fullfledged mainstream film so we didn't have the luxury of time or money. You get big budgets only when you have stars and this being my first film, I opted for brilliant actors. All the performers were extremely talented without me having to worry about any of them. We had workshops prior to the shoot when we got to know each other well and when in Ranchi we all lived together for a month," she reminisces. Besides Massey, the film features Ranvir Shorey, Tanuja, Om Puri, Kalki Koechlin, Tillotama Shome, Jim Saarbh and Gulshan Devaiah.
The shoot turned out to be a family holiday of sorts. Since his father Ranvir is also acting in the film, Konkona took her fiveyear-old son Haroon and his nanny along. And what was it like directing Ranvir? "He's a fine actor," smiles the actress who faced the camera for the first time at the age four and has done over 40 films in Hindi, Bengali and English since. She is the granddaughter of Chidananda Dasgupta, film historian, critic and cofounder of the Calcutta Film Society along with Satyajit Ray, and daughter of National Award winning actress-filmmaker Aparna Sen. Has her mother seen the film, "Yes, and she liked it apparently," smiles Konkona.
So what's the best thing about being a director? "I guess the fact that you can create your own world. Right now though I'm struggling to finish the post production in time for the September unveiling in Toronto," she says.
Priyanka Chopra goes to Toronto International Film Festival as jury member
8:05 AM
In elite company of James Franco, Ava DuVernay, Xavier Dolan
Sanyukta Iyer (MUMBAI MIRROR; July 15, 2016)
After conquering TV, films and award show red carpets in Hollywood,
Priyanka Chopra is all set to tread a new territory. The 33-year-old
actress is part of a seven-member jury of the Shorts Festival section at
the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Her co-judges include 127 Hours actor James Franco, Beasts of the Southern Wild cinematographer Ben Richardson, Selma director Ava DuVernay, who was also on the judges' panel at Mumbai's 17th MAMI film festival's competition section, Canadian writer-director Xavier Dolan, who, at 25, won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for his 2014 drama, Mommy, music video director and photographer, Nabil Elderkin and stop-motion animation artist Rachel Ryle.
A newly added
competition section for digital shorts, Shorts Festival invites
participants from around the world to submit 60-second films through
their Instagram accounts, following which the jury will handpick entries
to be screened on each day of the 10-day Toronto International Film
Festival, which kicks off on September 8. Meanwhile, they are slated to
select a winner for the Judge's Choice Award and Fan Favourite Award
categories, to be announced on August 18. PeeCee who has made appearances at TIFF before - first for Ashutosh Gowariker's What's Your Raashee? which premiered in 2009 and for Mary Kom in 2015 - shot for the first season of her American TV show, Quantico, Montreal, and has quite the fan following in Canada.
In July, the 33-year-old actress
graced the cover of five international magazines in a month, cementing
her position as an upcoming international icon. "It's all Quantico! The
show has done beyond what I ever thought it would do. Quantico and
Blindspot are the only two shows that began last year and have been
renewed. Every other show was cancelled," PeeCee had shared with Mirror
in an earlier chat before flying off to New York on July 4, adding that
her show now airs in 210 territories, 56 languages and that she recently
travelled to France and the UK for the premieres of the first season.
"It's overwhelming. Everything feels like an interesting cultural experience. Hindi cinema fans have received my films well, but this is something completely different. These are not the people I am used to seeing as fans!"
Now, on to newer paths?
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