È morto Rituparno Ghosh

Grave lutto per il cinema indiano. Rituparno Ghosh, talentuoso e pluripremiato regista bengali, si è spento questa mattina a Kolkata a causa di un attacco di cuore. Il 31 agosto avrebbe compiuto 50 anni. Ghosh è molto noto nel circuito dei festival: numerose sue pellicole sono state proiettate in diverse rassegne internazionali. Il suo è un cinema decisamente d'autore, ma Ghosh non ha mai disdegnato di scritturare star di grosso calibro - anche in prestito da Bollywood - per i suoi film (Aishwarya Rai, Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgan, Preity Zinta, eccetera). Prosenjit Chatterjee, superstar del cinema popolare in lingua bengali, ha offerto performance magnifiche nelle pellicole dirette da Ghosh (vedi Dosar). La post-produzione di Satyanweshi, ultimo lavoro del regista, è tuttora in corso.

Aggiornamento del 5 giugno 2013 - The Alternative World of Rituparno Ghosh, Myna Mukherjee, Open:

'Of all his characters, the one he felt closest to was Binodini, played by Aishwarya Rai in his adaptation of Chokher Bali (...). Binodini stood on a threshold of social transformation as she struggled for social acceptance as a widow after the British had legislated widow remarriage in the face of countrywide resistance. Rituparno felt a strong sense of identification with the tragic isolation of someone caught in the half-light of legitimacy. It was this isolation perhaps that made him one of the most sensitive Indian directors of recent years. In a society with inequalities so deeply entrenched, he put across the struggle of being a human being - swallowed by desire, choked by experience, trapped by social expectations - with lyrical melancholy. And like all accomplished tragedians, he was the master of the dark poem, the kind of poetry that only comes through when bleakness is almost unbearable.

In the 21 years since he made his first film, Rituparno was part of over 24 films. He directed and wrote over 21 of them, and acted in his last three releases as the lead. His films have won over 18 National Awards, and have travelled widely across the international festival circuit. He is acknowledged as the central figure in the late 1990s’ renaissance of Bengali Cinema that broke what was otherwise a bleak period. Best known for emotional dramas, his career spanned genres as diverse as children’s films (Hirer Angti, 1992) and murder mysteries (Shubho Mahurat). At a time when cinema was centered around the ‘Hero’, Ritu chose to make film after film about women. Unishe April and Titli, with Aparna Sen and Konkona Sen [Sharma], both explored the tensions and intimacies of a mother-daughter relationship. Bariwali won Kirron Kher a Best Actress National Award for her portrayal of an ageing spinster in a decrepit house in a state of slow decay. Dahan explored the apathy and misogyny of society around victims of sexual assault. Ritu was always willing to take risks. From incest to infidelity, he invested the hitherto sacrosanct middle-class Bengali family on screen with narratives that had been wiped off cinematically in the sanitised blaze of mainstream depictions. In Utsab, Dosar and Shob Charitro Kalponik, he explored complicated, damaged and often flawed human relations in a sensitive but unsentimental way. Rituparno was willing to break cinematic norms as well. For example, Dosar,(...) a tale of an unfaithful marriage in the afterlight of an accident, was shot completely in black-and-white. Shob Charitro Kalponik departs from linear narrative and descends into surrealism as a stunningly beautiful Bipasha Basu is interrupted in her infidelity by her poet husband’s death, an event that leads her to re-interrogate her entire relationship with him.

Inspired by Bengal cultural icons Satyajit Ray and Tagore, Rituparno’s films helped define the next generation of Bengal New Wave cinema. He paid tribute to Rabindranath Tagore by reinterpreting three classics: Chokher Bali (which won him the Locarno Best Film Award in 2003), Noukadubi (a period film) and his most recent release Chitrangada. By the time I came to know him, Rituparno Ghosh was a star director and had earned the reputation of being something of a diva. His Hindi film Raincoat, featuring Aishwarya Rai and Ajay Devgan, had established him as one of the few to cross over from regional cinema to Bollywood. Other mainstream Hindi actors like Manisha Koirala and Bipasha Basu had also worked with him. He had hosted two celebrity chat shows, Ebong Rituparno and Rituparno and Co., in which he addressed his guests fondly as tui (an intimate ‘you’). His most telling moment on TV was when he publicly scolded Mir, a well-known mimicry and stand-up artist. Mir had in the past used Ritu as material for his comic routine. Ritu shamed him on national television in that one show, asking him if he realised how prejudiced he was in poking fun at effeminate men. Ritu himself had always been effeminate, but he slowly claimed his queer self in public spaces. His flamboyant turbans, kohled eyes and flowing robes earned him notoriety and a grudging respect in Kolkata’s art appreciation circles. It was his city, one that ‘could neither ignore nor embrace him’, in his own words. (...)

It was the first time Ritu was to act in a movie [Aar Ekti Premer Golpo], and that too, in the role of an openly gay filmmaker. The film’s director was Kaushik Ganguly, but it was Ritu’s story. His involvement in every frame of the film was well known. (...) How momentous that film was in its representation of queer life. It felt as if his entire career had led up to the courage it took to make that one film. Rituparno made Memories in March and Chitrangada after that. These dealt defiantly and unapologetically with the exile of homosexuality, with retribution and, finally, redemption. Each was an intense exhalation for queer audiences. In the deafening din of mainstream heteronormativity and the trite stereotypes that are often the only representation of a largely silent and invisibilised community, here was cinema that made them belong. There was desire, pain, complexity, beauty, isolation and finally poetry. In his specificity of representation, he created cinema that was universal'.

Murder 3 : Recensione

[Blog] Recensione di Murder 3, thriller diretto da Vishesh Bhatt con Randeep Hooda, Aditi Rao Hydari e Sara Loren.

Bollywood - The greatest love story ever told: arriva il dvd!

Presentato a Cannes nel 2011 e proiettato a Milano poche settimane fa nell'ambito del 23° Festival del Cinema Africano, d'Asia e America Latina, il sorprendente e frizzantissimo documentario girato da Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra e Jeff Zimbalist, dedicato al cinema bollywoodiano, Bollywood - The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, diventa un dvd.

Il cofanetto, pare si tratterà infatti del dvd accompagnato da un libro, farà parte della collana Feltrinelli Real Cinema e uscirà il prossimo luglio.

Non vediamo l'ora!

Aishwarya Rai al Life Ball 2013

Ieri Aishwarya Rai ha partecipato a Vienna al Life Ball 2013 sfoggiando un magnifico abito da sirena di Roberto Cavalli. Anche lo stilista italiano e Afef hanno presenziato all'evento.

  

Conferenza stampa

Nautanki Saala! : Recensione

 

 

[Blog] Recensione di Nautanki Saala! (2013), spassosa commedia romantica diretta da Rohan Sippy. Con Ayushmann Khurrana e Kunaal Roy Kapoor.

Yamla Pagla Deewana 2: presentazione colonna sonora

Il 7 maggio 2013 è stata presentata a Mumbai la colonna sonora di Yamla Pagla Deewana 2. All'evento hanno partecipato, fra gli altri, Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Akshay Kumar, Hrithik e Rakesh Roshan, Juhi Chawla, Anupam Kher, Kunal Kohli, Riteish Deshmukh e Genelia D'Souza.

Dibakar Banerjee, the best director today

Vi segnalo l'intervista concessa da Dibakar Banerjee a Parul Khanna, pubblicata oggi da Brunch. Dibakar Banerjee, the best director today:

'Your filmmaking is influenced by...

My first influence is my family, which has consumed and created entertainment. We would read, listen to the radio, put up plays during Durga Puja in Delhi. Doordarshan is another influence, it gave me a chance to see regional and world cinema. I would also visit all the film festivals in Delhi. My non-Bengali friends, my life in Delhi have been a huge influences too. Mumbai, where I live now, my life here, it's transformation from a manufacturing city to a services city, all have had an impact on me. My days at National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad opened up an unknown western to me. My wife has been the deepest influence. She's very aesthetic and she has created this beautiful life full of arts, books, poetry and even plants.

You signed a three-films contract with Yash Raj. Is that a rite of passage into the elite club?

What rubbish! This is what I don't like. This bracketing of people. What is elite about working with YRF? I discovered that Aditya Chopra and I are very similar - we both are extremely professional, prefer our films to speak for themselves, don't give interview to be in newspapers every other week, and are passionate about films. We were very clear since the first meeting that I have the creative controls and YRF will be in-charge of marketing the film. It will be my vision. The alliance was based on the clear understanding that if YRF changes my way of filmmaking, it will lose out on what they set out looking for.

The industry is celebrating outsiders...

Yes, people from film families and outsiders are co-existing. The reason the audience watches a Dibakar or Anurag [Kashyap] film is same as Zoya [Akhtar] and Karan [Johar] films - good filmmaking. Karan made his first film when his father wasn't doing too well, he had to go through a number of hardships. And these people have to prove themselves much more. I have nothing to lose, it's like someone pointed out to me, 'Even if your film fails, you will be put on a pedestal and stories will be written about your edgy way of filmmaking'. But people are very harsh on these guys. So, everyone's working with some or other handicap. For one Karan Johar who has made it, there are five who haven't. The basics for survival are standard for everyone - a little more passion, a lot more hard work , a much better vision - than the other person.

Is your story of struggle very romantic?

Unfortunately, no (laughs). (...) When I was working in the advertising world in Delhi, it was at its peak. (...) I was this hotshot Ad guy, making a good amount of money. Even after I shifted to Mumbai, my wife, who's into the corporate world was making enough and while Anurag was struggling and making ends meet, I was living in a posh flat. And have never worked under anyone or struggled for money since I was 26.

So making your first movie, Khosla Ka Ghosla was a cakewalk? (...)

I came from an advertising background, I had shot 50 commercials, so I pretty much knew the mechanics of filmmaking. But the struggle started when I moved to Mumbai in 2004. There were no takers for the film. Every distributor had seen the film but no one wanted to take it. I was in wilderness then. I was sort of in a black hole. But when that two-year period ended, I knew I was invincible, I had learnt most things about life and films in that time. I had become negative and I was going to give up (a friend had told me that the moment you stop expecting, things happen), and just when I did, it got taken by UTV Motion Pictures.

You are one of those people who run away to the woods to write?

No, no, I grew up in a family of six, in three rooms. One room had my parents, one was the drawing room, in the third room, it was my grandmother, the TV, dining table, me, my sister, me and the cupboard full of books. I learnt study to study with the TV on. So I am capable of doing my shit, it doesn't matter where as long as the weather is good. Of course, I always co-write. I want to stay away from the trap of a director writing - scripts become too indulgent, directors have a bloated way of writing. So if I collaborate, we can just stick to good storytelling. I have co-written Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and Shanghai. (...) I also (...) co-wrote Love Sex Aur Dhokha. (...) And I take inspiration from everything around me - books, music, normal people I meet, something someone said while we are rolling on the floor and drunk. Like Karan said something hilarious yesterday, and I was like, 'this as to make way into a film'.

Women are kind of non-existent in your films.

I haven't a clue. I think I need to get myself examined (laughs), because 60 to 70 per cent of my team - scriptwriter, assistant director, art director - comprises women. Maybe, because in my head I don't see men and women as separate entities, but again I feel women are more organized and structured than men'.

Graffiti and street art have arrived

Vi segnalo l'articolo Graffiti and street art have arrived, di Manit Moorjani, pubblicato oggi da Brunch:

'If you have to pick someone up from Delhi airport, and you start from Lajpat Nagar or Malviya Nagar, you will get to see nearly one-sixth of the city’s graffiti as you drive. (...) Graffiti artists started spamming our city walls more than five years ago, and today, you can’t miss their creative outbursts. Although provocative graffiti is often removed, it always seems to come back. (...) By now, our underground ‘public’ artists have already evolved into two separate sects - the graffiti artist and the street artist.

LPG fuel hike, Daku - Delhi

Not quite the same

Graffiti is a form of lettering. A graffiti artist spray paints his name or a symbol on a wall in the form of a stylised signature (which is often very colourful). In true graffiti spirit, especially in the Western sense of the term, this signifies ‘possession’ of the particular wall. However, in Indian cities, most artists are doing it to rid dirty walls of the eyesore that are paan stains! As Sun1, a popular artist from Mumbai, puts it, “India is full of colour, and what better way to showcase it than on the walls?” He uses a variety of fonts, characters and colours to beautify walls. “Now people even stand and watch me do it. They are always curious as to what colour I will use next and how.”

Street art, on the other hand, is any type of visual art created outdoors - whether it’s a spray-painted mural, stencil art, sticker art or even street poster art. It’s more than lettering. It represents an idea - a picture or a set of words. Whether it is the ‘There goes Mumbai nightlife’ stencil job in Versova by an artist who goes by the name of Tyler, or the signature ‘Daku’ emblazoned in Devnagari on a colourful wall in Okhla, in south Delhi, the impact is unmistakable. “Most graffiti artists want their name etched in the popular psyche. The charm of street art is when it is discovered in the morning - when bystanders wonder who’s done it,” says Daku, who first began doing graffiti in the Devnagari script. These days Daku, who prefers to use this assumed name, displays his wacky street art on the roadside too: stickers are stuck over ‘Stop’ road signs saying ‘Stop Pretending’, ‘Stop Promising’ and ‘Stop Shopping’. And then there is his celebrated LPG price hike piece showing an LPG cylinder shooting upwards in the form of a rocket.

However, both these guilds - the graffiti and street artists - could be working with or without legal sanction. They might take permission from owners or authorities to paint walls (although most graffiti artists seldom do), or they might go out hooded in the night with spray cans, wait for an opportune moment, do the deed and silently walk away. But both create art that reaches out to people, and in most cases has an underlying message.

Brainwash, Tyler - Mumbai

Let us spray

The heyday of graffiti was in the early 1980s, coinciding with the popularity of New York’s hip-hop culture, when gangs marked their territory with the spray can. That was also when it became a tool of protest in London and Berlin, around the time of the aerosol boom. Today, graffiti has become almost beautiful (even though it’s still illegal in most parts of the world). It has become a medium for artistic expression without restriction.

"My graffiti does not come out of any rebellion. For me it’s all about my own unique style of writing, which is different from how another graffiti artist does it," says Zine, one of Delhi’s most active graffiti artists, who has seen the scene grow from 2006, when there were just a few players, to the present when even school kids are involved. "In my graffiti, every letter that is painted is a letter that I have made. It’s about my own individuality. Graffiti is a form of calligraphy, but it is different in a way that it is much bigger than calligraphy. It is an art form that is out there on the streets. Many of the young kids who come for our graffiti workshops have their own styles. The idea is to have fun and not take it too seriously," he adds.

Most practitioners view graffiti and street art as a vibrant art form that livens up the landscape of our concrete jungles. But there are many others for whom it is a way to speak out. Mumbai’s Tyler, for instance, has made some of the most popular and revolutionary street art in the city, and believes that the spray can is the biggest weapon available to the common man. “People have stopped caring for each other. There is garbage on the streets and ugly political hoardings and advertisements everywhere. We need to wake up society with art or with words,” he says. “When I go out at night and spray what I think about the system, for those moments, I have beaten the system. With graffiti, there is no message. The medium itself is the message.” Tyler’s ‘Never forget the world is yours’ work (with the postscript ‘*Terms and Conditions apply’) in Mumbai won him worldwide acclaim. In the two years since he began working, he has clocked almost three artworks a month.

Brinda Project, Harsh Raman - Delhi

Hue and cry

For Delhi-based street artist Harsh Raman, painting on the city’s walls is a ticket to showcasing his art to the masses, who don’t have time to visit an art gallery. “The beauty of street art is that once I’ve finished my painting, it’s out there and does not belong to me. You can’t buy it either. But you can check it out anytime,” says Raman, whose stunning artwork of a Bharatanatyam dancer cosmetically transforming into a samba dancer on the outside walls of Hauz Khas Apartments, done in tandem with Brazilian street artist Sergio Cordeiro, is one of the city’s highlights. “Before I started painting on the Hauz Khas Apartments wall, all I could see around me were banners and advertisements - people selling things. But all I wanted to see was something interesting that could bring a smile to my face. The only purpose of drawing art on the streets is this engagement with the public,” says Raman, who was also the assistant art director in Prakash Jha’s films, Aarakshan and Chakravyuh.

Brinda Project, Harsh Raman e Sergio Cordeiro - Delhi

Almost legal

The majority of graffiti artists start young. Delhi’s Zine, while still in school, was inspired by the graffiti on the walls outside his school in Vasant Vihar. “Those walls spoke to me. While going to school, we’d suddenly find new artwork on the walls, and that felt amazing. And once I had done it myself, I had to do it again and again,” he says. Delhi-based teenager Slik, too, began by spray painting his alias at the Khan Market parking lot late at night. But he always made sure he was back at home in time for school. “My city is full of spit stains on the walls and I want to cover them with colourful artwork, without hurting other people’s sentiments. Of course, I do this on a student’s pocket money,” he says.

With the growing popularity of street art in our metros, acceptance is also growing. So artists such as Zine are abandoning their secret identities to produce even more elaborate and intricate designs. Zine recently sought permission from the Panchsheel Park taxi stand to paint their wall with his name - after showing them his earlier work. Shedding their apprehensions, the cabbies gave their assent and he painted the mural in front of them. It is now one of the coolest-looking cab stands in Delhi. “Painting at night gives you an adrenaline high. It’s for the kicks. But apart from the artists, everybody else now also seems to like street art and graffiti,” says Zine'.

Zine - Delhi, Panchsheel Park Taxi Stand

Bollywood Art Project, Ranjit Dahiya - Mumbai

Kolkata

A Bollywood la Svizzera piace meno

Vi segnalo l'articolo A Bollywood la Svizzera piace meno, pubblicato da TicinOnline il 7 maggio 2013: 'L'amore dei produttori indiani per laghi e montagne svizzere pare ormai definitivamente tramontato. (...) Il motivo è semplice: la saturazione. (...) Negli anni '90 e nei primi anni degli anni 2000, l'industria cinematografica indiana ha girato in Svizzera fino a 40 film, oggi si assiste invece a un drastico calo. Gli indiani pare che abbiano scelto altri luoghi per girare i loro film. (...) Svizzera Turismo ha calcolato che nel 2012 sono stati 474.882 i turisti indiani che hanno alloggiato negli alberghi svizzeri. È una cifra record. In India cresce il numero di persone appartenenti alla classe media. Ogni anno sono dai 40 ai 50 milioni gli indiani che si aggiungono alla schiera di coloro che possono permettersi di viaggiare all'estero. Con 300 franchi al giorno gli indiani sono i turisti che spendono di più nel mondo'. L'articolo punta il dito anche contro l'assenza di incentivi finanziari da parte delle autorità svizzere. Comunque il Ticino si difende bene, anzi, è solo all'inizio: basti pensare alle recenti riprese di Dhoom:3 (clicca qui).

The new brand of Bollywood horror films

Vi segnalo l'articolo The new brand of Bollywood horror films, di Amrah Ashraf, pubblicato da Brunch il 5 maggio 2013. In copertina un truce Saif Ali Khan in versione cacciatore di zombie.

'Most ’80s horror films were almost exclusively made for the wolf-whistling, scare-seeking male. “People lined outside theatres for my movies because they were entertaining,” says Shyam Ramsay, who comes from the family that made India’s first zombie movie Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche (1972), and also worked on other horror hits like Darwaza (1978), Purana Mandir (1984), Veerana (1988) and Purani Haveli (1989). “I sold my movies on sex and bhatakti aatmas [wandering spirits].” So popular were the Ramsays’ smutty scarefests that by the end of the decade, it was impossible for audiences to expect anything else from a horror movie. No other filmmaker wanted to dirty their hands with the genre, until Ram Gopal Varma made Raat (1992) and Vikram Bhatt made Raaz (2002).

In contrast, the new batch of movies actually makes horror sound cool. There are no (...) sinister watchmen, (...) no dense jungles and definitely no skeletons. This time, the locations are real, the scenarios are believable, the details authentic. “The reason Ragini MMS (2011) worked was because it was marketed like a date movie with supernatural elements,” says Suparn Varma, director of Aatma. “People bought the plot because they could believe it. Couples do go to hotels on date nights. They just don’t expect it to become a threesome with a ghost! This movie made them believe that it could happen to them.” And that’s probably the biggest difference. The horror fantasy is rooted deeply enough in reality to make it seem plausible. (...) In Go Goa Gone, three friends on a trip to Goa realise that what they’re actually being attacked by are zombies! "You forget that it’s a movie and start relating it to your life,” says Raj Nidimoru, one half of director duo Raj & DK and maker of Go Goa Gone. “That is when horror grips you and puts you on the edge. Like they say, truth is stranger and scarier than fiction.”

What’s in a tagline?

The next time you watch a horror movie, note the tagline. It will feature terms like ‘zom-com’, ‘supernatural-thriller’, ‘psych-thriller’, ‘thriller-drama’ and ‘neo-noir’. No one seems to be marketing simple scares anymore, and it’s all because horror has become more than vengeful monsters and bloody rampages. (...) Incidentally when Kannan Iyer, director of Ek Thi Daayan, started working on the script 10 years ago, he never saw it as a horror film. He saw it only as a suspense drama. “I still don’t know if it falls in the horror genre,” Iyer says. (...) “But that’s the thing; horror has evolved so much in the last 10 years that it has sub-genres now.” Suparn Varma explains that the taglines are a reflection of how horror movies aren’t just about horror anymore. They’re also about drama, action, suspense and even comedy today. “You make a movie for an audience - the ones that expect a ghost and the ones that expect a story - you cannot afford to alienate any one group,” he says. “You have to balance both sensibilities. And what is real is never one-dimensional. It is always layered and so are these movies.”

Fright choice, baby (...)

There’s a new crop of directors who’ve dared to experiment with the genre. (...) "I wanted my first film to be different. That’s why I worked on this idea for 10 years," he [Iyer] says. "When Emraan [Hashmi] heard the script, he loved it and when filmmaker Ekta Kapoor heard it, she wanted to start immediately." Iyer also explains that casting and roping in A-list backers have been the most efficient tools in raising the profile of what was once a B-grade genre. (...) Director-producer Mahesh Bhatt begs to differ. He believes that the star cast is inconsequential. “Emraan Hashmi was the lead in Raaz 3 and Ek Thi Daayan. Yet, Ek Thi... could not manage a decent opening,” he says. He believes that the only formula that works today is mass appeal. “Ek Thi Daayan was a good movie but it was made for a critical audience. Raaz 3 clicked with the public because it had everything that a filmgoer wants - strong script, good music, believable horror, desire, obsession and sex.”

Ghost in the machine (...) 

“If you can’t plant the seed of doubt in your audience’s minds, you’ve failed as a horror filmmaker,” says Iyer. There’s no room for grave errors (pun intended) and the best way to avoid them is with technology. While Ramsay and his generation had to rely on tacky make-up and poor computer graphics (remember Do Gaz Zameen’s cartoonish zombies?), the new filmmakers happily deploy cutting-edge computer graphics (CG), customised prosthetics, a dedicated visual effects team, 3D and Dolby sound to make the supernatural look perfectly natural. (...) "For Aatma, the CG artists started working with me months before we started shooting," Suparn Varma recalls. "Bad graphics mean that your audience will walk out of the movie laughing instead of being petrified." He also used Dolby surround sound to create the necessary atmospherics. (...) Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who played a menacing spirit in the film, has a good laugh too: "If you thought I was scary in Aatma, the credit should go to the technical team. They made a docile man like me look so demonic on screen." (...) For Go Goa Gone, the filmmakers needed realistic versions of the undead monsters we know from Hollywood flicks. “We knew we couldn’t fool the audience with amateur stuff. The zombies had to look convincing,” says Raj. So they used prosthetics. The duo spent a lot of time storyboarding the film just to understand where they could pull off the look using just prosthetics and where they needed computer graphics.

The future looks scary

That is what it takes to make a supernatural movie these days. Everything from background score, music, lights, colour-grading [the colour tone in which the film is set], to ambient sound is thoroughly studied. “A still shot with no action can scare the audience if the background score kicks in just before or after the audience expects it,” says Suparn Varma. It explains why there are now big names backing the genre. Vishal Bhardwaj and Ekta Kapoor produced Ek Thi Daayan. (...) Raj & DK, on the other hand, have Saif Ali Khan as the producer of their film'.

Vedi anche Zombie e vampiri alla conquista di Bollywood

Bollywoodart : Manifesti e immagini del Cinema Hindi

 

[Blog]  Gli sfavillanti manifesti di Bollywood sono il riflesso dell’ossessione cinematografica del popolo indiano, e ancora di più degli abitanti di Mumbai, per i quali incontrare ovunque colorati poster giganteschi equivale ad un punto fermo e ad un’abitudine quotidiana. Simbolo della sfaccettata metropoli del cinema, che orfana dei suoi divi non sarebbe più la stessa, i poster sono una seduzione visiva oltre che una capillare azione pubblicitaria, una tradizione sublime che trova la sua massima espressione proprio nel cinema commerciale, un’arte antica e affascinante che segue l’evoluzione della storia del cinema.  L'articolo completo nella sezione Cos'è Bollywood.

Aamir Khan: The Khan who cares

Proiezione speciale di QSQT

Nei giorni scorsi Aamir Khan ha festeggiato i primi 25 anni di carriera. Nel 1988 fu distribuito il suo film d'esordio da attore adulto, Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, pellicola che segnò il debutto anche di Juhi Chawla. I due hanno presenziato recentemente ad una proiezione speciale di QSQT. Vi segnalo l'articolo The Khan who cares, di Mayank Shekhar, pubblicato il 29 aprile 2013.

Le prime del 3 maggio 2013: Bombay Talkies

Il 3 maggio 2013 il cinema indiano festeggia i suoi primi 100 anni di vita. Per l'occasione, viene distribuito nelle sale Bombay Talkies, film suddiviso in quattro parti, ciascuna delle quali diretta da un regista diverso: Karan Johar, Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee e Zoya Akhtar. Il cast è di tutto rispetto: Rani Mukherjee, Randeep Hooda, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Vineet Kumar Singh, Ranvir Shorey. Ranbir Kapoor presta la voce narrante. La pellicola è stata proiettata in prima mondiale il 28 aprile a Delhi in occasione del Centenary Film Festival, e verrà presentata a Cannes, fuori concorso,  nell'evento Séance de gala en l'honneur de l'Inde. La colonna sonora è composta dal talentuoso Amit Trivedi. Vi propongo i video dei brani Bachchan, Akkad Bakkad, nonché il sensazionale Apna Bombay Talkies, che riunisce un nugolo di star (clicca qui). Trailer. 

Vedi anche:

- Festival di Cannes 2013

- Bombay Talkies: recensioni, 4 maggio 2013