The 11th Mumbai Film Festival welcomes the International Lifetime Achievement Award winner Theo Angelopoulos

Mumbai, November 4, 2009: After a vibrant start at the 11th Mumbai Film Festival, the tempo and spirit continued on Wednesday the 6th day of the festival, as the day witnessed a series of world class film screenings including Happy Go Lucky directed by Mike Leigh, Disgrace directed by Steven Jacobs, Kaminey directed by Vishal Bharadwaj, Katalin Varga directed by Peter Strickland amongst many others. MFF is a Reliance Big Entertainment initiative and has the distinction of being the only international film festival in India to be organized by an independent body of practicing film professionals.

Greek movie maestro Theo Angelopoulos was welcomed by Mumbai city. He will be felicitated tommorrow with the International Lifetime Achievement award at the closing ceremony of the MFF. Born in Athens in 1935, Angelopoulos’ filmmaking career began in 1965 and since then his films have participated in countless international festivals winning all major awards; establishing his reputation as one of the most influential directors in contemporary cinema.  Major retrospectives honoring the work of Theo Angelopoulos have been held all over the world.

Wednesday also saw screenings of films such as Haat, a Rajasthani Movie, directed by Seema Sharma starring Divya Dutta, Yashpal Sharma, Mukesh Tiwari.  “So far this is one of the finest movies I have worked in. The movie was shot in extremely difficult situations” said Divya Dutta.

Actors of the movie Bollywood Beats, Lillette Dubey and Smriti Mishra along with the director Mehul Shah and Aparna Malladi also visited the festival. Bollywood Beats is a movie which explores the depth of emotions in relations one never expects to have was screened today.

Directors of The little One (La Pivellina), Rainer Frimmel and Tizza Covi competing for the USD 100,000 in the International Competition were also present at Fun Cinemas to interact with press. Having directed couple of documentaries, the director duo had studied photography and together founded an independent film production Company, Vento Film. The story is about a cosmos of outcast in present-day Italy. The lead actors of the movie are Patrizia Geradi and Asia Crippa.

The day progressed with an interesting open forum on Media Education, presented by Whistling Woods in association with Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image (MAMI). The panel of speakers featured Matthias Luthardt from Germany, and Siddharth Sinha from India, both young filmmakers who had been film students a few years ago; Anil Zankar, a writer and senior professor at several media schools, and Ravi Gupta, Executive Director, Whistling Woods International, a founder-member of the SRFTI, Kolkata and a former member of the Governing Board of FTII, Pune.

At the outset, Anil presented a brief overview of the subject, and referred to “the paradigm shift in Media Education with the sweeping changes in the audio-visual culture, in the last 7 years and the resultant growth of Media Institutes, offering courses not only in film and television, but also in advertising, public relations etc.” He also focused on “the dearth of media teachers and the need for investment in training the trainers.” Mathias and Siddharth reflected on their respective experiences while at film school. To a question on ‘Standardisation’, the unanimous answer was “you cannot standardise filmmaking or the vision of the teaching process.” 

The festival closed today as the Japanese movie director, Hirofumi Kawaguchi of Torocco (Rail Truck) presented his film at the festival. Kawaguchi has worked as an assistant director on many movies and Torocco is his first feature film. It is a family drama that narrates the journey of a widow, Yumiko and his children moving into Yumiko’s in-laws house, situated at a mountain village of Taiwan. The movie just gets interesting when the elder son Atsushi gets rebellious against both the society in which he has grown up and his mother.

Brand alliances for the festival include BIG FM 92.7, bollywoodhungama.com, Bigoye.com, Bigflix.com, BIG Cinemas, Fun Cinemas, BIG Events, BIGAdda.com, Reliance MediaWorks, Kingfisher Premium, Block Dog, Reliance Tech Services, Reliance Broadband, Jet airways, Sun-N Sand Hotel, Carzonrent, Bright Outdoor.

About MAMI:

Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI) is a body comprised of Indian film industry stalwarts which was founded in 1997 by late filmmaker Shri Hrishikesh Mukherjee. Noted filmmaker Shri Shyam Benegal heads the body that consists of film directors including: Yash Chopra, Ashutosh Gowarikar, Karan Johar, renowned actresses Shabana Azmi and Jaya Bachchan, actor-director Amol Palekar and Farhan Akhtar and the chairman of Reliance Big Entertainment Amit Khanna as Trustees. 

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