Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival Returns With South Asian Focus

Naman Ramachandran Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino and Indian filmmakers Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti‘s Tiger Baby will lay the ground for future collaborations at a Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival event. The event, designed as a celebration of Guadagnino, will honor his work. “Tiger Baby’s celebration of Luca Guadagnino’s contributions to world cinema marks a significant step toward fostering international collaboration and sharing diverse stories with a global audience.

Naman Ramachandran Bangladeshi auteur Mostofa Sarwar Farooki has wrapped his latest film “Last Defenders of Monogamy.” The cast is headlined by popular Bangladeshi actor Chanchal Chowdhury (“Karagar,” “Hawa”) and Xefer Rahman and the cast also includes Samina Hussain Prema and Shuddho Rai. The film follows Shafqat (Chowdhury), a father of two adolescents and a loving husband, who is a firm believer in the ideals of monogamy but the winds of change take a big test of his ideologies. “Working with Farooki is always special.

Stars from both the Hindi and South Indian film industries turned out in force for the opening night of Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, including Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Sonam Kapoor and Bhumi Pednekar, along with Tamil star Kamal Haasan, who presented the Excellence in Cinema Award (South Asia) to director-producer Mani Ratnam. 

Naman Ramachandran “Zende,” a feature documentary about supercop Madhukar Zende, who arrested the notorious Charles Sobhraj twice, will have its world premiere at the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. Produced by Dora Digs Studios and directed by debutant Akshay Shah, “Zende” is one of the first Indian feature documentaries to use artificial intelligence (AI) technology to recreate and regenerate some of Mumbai’s most iconic locations and moments in history.

Mumbai Film Fest To Honor Luca Guadagnino & Mani Ratnam

Naman Ramachandran Italy’s Luca Guadagnino and India’s Mani Ratnam will receive the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival‘s 2023 Excellence in Cinema awards. Ratnam will receive the Excellence in Cinema (South Asia) award and Guadagnino the Excellence in Cinema (International) award. The awards will be presented at the festival’s opening ceremony on Oct.

Naman Ramachandran Chinese superstar actor and producer Fan Bingbing will be the 2023 recipient of the Singapore International Film Festival‘s (SGIFF) Cinema Icon Award. The festival will screen three of Fan’s films, curated by her – the recent “Green Night,” “Buddha Mountain” and “Double Xposure” – and the star will walk the red carpet on opening night, Nov. 30.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Chinese film sales company Parallax Films is poised to make a splash this week in Tokyo. The outfit has two titles in the Tokyo International Film Festival official selection and a host of festival-travelled Chinese films in the TIFFCOM market. Appearing in main competition is “A Long Shot,” a crime drama by first time feature director Gao Peng.

The Buckingham Murders, directed by Hansal Mehta and starring Kareena Kapoor Khan, has been set as the opening film of the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Cinema has been a little duller for the eight-year absence of Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, the Indian-born auteur whose flamboyant formal style carried over from the music video realm into a distinctively sensuous strain of mainstream fantasy filmmaking — halted by the relative disappointment of 2015’s lackluster Ryan Reynolds vehicle “Self/less.” That makes Singh Dhandwar’s return with “Dear Jassi” something of an event, even before considering the film’s surprising expansion of his repertoire: Leaving behind Hollywood, genre cinema and his trademark maximalist mise-en-scène for his first film made in his homeland, the director keeps things simple but stately in this fact-based tale of young, star-crossed love in India’s Punjab region. The result is sometimes slack but incrementally powerful, marked by a palpable sense of renewed purpose on the part of its helmer.

The Wrestler, directed by Bangladeshi-Canadian filmmaker Iqbal H. Chowdhury, and September 1923, from Japan’s Tatsuya Mori, picked up the New Currents Awards as Busan International Film Festival wrapped a busy 28th edition on October 13. 

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Iqbal H. Choudhury’s “The Wrestler” and Mori Tatsutya’s “September 1923” were announced joint winners of the New Currents competition at the Busan International Film Festival. “The Wrester” “was like a single round match, magically depicting an exciting narrative,” the jury said.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief “Solids by the Seashore,” “The Berefts” and “House of the Seasons” were all multiple winners of the Vision Awards at the Busan International Film Festival on Thursday evening. Another winner was “Yellow Door: ’90s Lo-fi Film Club,” a documentary celebrating Korea’s early cinephiles, who include “Parasite” director Bong Joon-ho. The Vision Awards precede the main New Currents Competition and the Jiseok Competition prizes which will be presented on Saturday at the festival’s closing ceremony.FIPRESCI Award“That Summer’s Lie” Dir. Sohn Hyun-lok.

The co-heads of Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival, which was rescheduled at the eleventh hour this week due to the Israel-Gaza crisis, have vowed that the event will go ahead in some shape or form.

Monsoon Wedding and A Suitable Boy filmmaker Mira Nair has been announced as the Head of Jury for the South Asia Competition at this year’s Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival (October 27-November 5). 

Naman Ramachandran Devashish Makhija’s survival thriller “Joram,” which is playing at the Busan International Film Festival, will be released theatrically worldwide by Zee Studios in December. The film, which premiered at Rotterdam earlier this year, is in Busan’s A Window on Asian Cinema strand. Eminent actor Manoj Bajpayee, who previously starred in Makhija’s 2016 short “Taandav” and played the title role in “Bhonsle,” plays Dasru, a tribal migrant worker in Mumbai whose past catches up with him and he must flee with his infant daughter Joram.

Mumbai Film Festival has announced a packed line-up of 250 films, including the 14 titles selected for its inaugural South Asia Competition, part of an expansion of the festival’s vision to become a hub for works from South Asia and South Asian diaspora talent. 

Dear Jassi arrives with echoes of Madonna’s 1989 hit “Dear Jessie” and its sugary promise of pink elephants and lemonade, but none of that turns out to be forthcoming in Tarsem Singh Dhandwar’s beautiful and brutal sixth feature. Instead, we have perhaps the most disturbing bait-and-switch since George Sluizer’s original iteration of The Vanishing, a Punjabi Juliet-meets-Romeo story that’s much harsher that any so-far-filmed version of West Side Story and a whole lot funnier. This dissonance takes a while to reveal itself, but when it does, the shock is visceral. The fact that almost everything is true is the killer blow, and the shockwave of that reverberates through the poignant final credits, a static shot that forces the audience, or maybe just simply dares them, to think about what they’ve just seen.  

Naman Ramachandran After his fiction feature debut, the absurdist satire “Eeb Allay Ooo!,” Indian filmmaker Prateek Vats is readying political comedy “Chronicles of a Confession.” The film is a selection at the Busan International Film Festival‘s Asian Project Market. “Eeb Allay Ooo!” won big at the Mumbai Film Festival and went on to play at the Berlinale, Sao Paolo and Valladolid among many other festivals.

Marta Balaga “Hesitation Wound” and “Hollywoodgate” were named winners at the Zurich Film Festival, as the 19th edition of the Swiss festival came to a close. Selman Nacar’s drama “Hesitation Wound” impressed the Feature Film Competition jury.