IndiaPost.com - Heaven on Earth to open MIAAC Film Festival

NEW YORK: The Eighth Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council (MIAAC) Film Festival opens Nov 5 at Jazz at Lincoln Center with Deepa Mehta's 'Heaven On Earth', a bold film using Indian mythological underpinnings that soar into modern magical realism to examine the inner world of an Indian immigrant to Canada.

The five-day festival will screen New York and US premieres of independent Indian and Diaspora films at the Museum of Arts and Design, Jazz at Lincoln Center and Tribeca Cinemas. "The juxtapositional uptown - downtown presentation of the festival is reflected in the programming by our new Festival Director, L. Somi Roy," said Aroon Shivdasani, Executive Director of the Indo-American Arts Council.

"From classic films to emerging forms to global cinema by filmmakers of Indian origin in the UK, US and Canada and regional Indian cinema in Malayalam, Punjabi, Marathi and Bengali, the 8th MIAAC Film Festival offers a wide range of films from established and emerging filmmakers." The festival features premieres of fiction and non-fiction films by internationally renowned Indian filmmakers such as Adoor Gopalakrishnan's interlinked stories in 'Four Women'; and Ketan Mehta's 'Colors Of Passion', on Raja Ravi Varma, the Indian artist who dared to paint and mass-market his paintings of Hindu gods and goddesses.

Young filmmakers like Richie Mehta, whose touching debut feature 'Amal' looks at the value of modern India; and Manu Rewal, whose black comedy 'Love Bribes Etc.' reveals the harrowing workings of the Indian bureaucracy, show the new face of Indian and Diaspora cinema. The veteran director Shyam Benegal is represented by his epic 'Bose: The Forgotten Hero'.

The dramatic biography of the Indian nationalist leader who took up arms and allied with the Axis Powers, provides a counterpoint to T.C. McLuhan's 'The Frontier Gandhi: Badshah Khan, A Torch Of Peace', a documentary that tells the extraordinary story of a leader who was born into the inconceivable violence of Pashtun warrior society but adopted the non-violent struggle of Gandhi. Revisiting history takes a new British turn in the festival with 'Mother India 21st Century Remix', a media performance based on the great Indian epic Mother India by the London arts group Kala Phool, featuring live musicians and DJ Tigerstyle; and British Asian composer Nitin Sawhney's new score for Franz Osten's ravishing 1929 silent classic 'A Throw Of Dice' and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra.

The British Asian contribution also includes Shamim Sarif's 'I Can't Think Straight', a tender romantic comedy about a British Asian woman and Palestinian-Jordanian woman in London, and '60x60', a video installation of 1-minute films at Aicon Gallery by 20 artists each from the UK, India and Pakistan. A special selection of films examines the genre of Indian films known popularly as Bollywood, with documentaries on background dancers (Vinay Chowdhry's 'Personality'), the art of music composition (Brahmanand Singh's 'Pancham Unmixed' on R.D. Burman, the great Indian composer) and the making of an action film (Liz Mermin's 'Shot In Bombay').

A retrospective section featuring Ketan Anand's 'Chetan Anand: The Poetics Of Film', which surveys the work of his father, will be accompanied by a rare archival screening of the latter's 'Lowly City', the first Indian film to be shown (and to win the Grand Prix) at Cannes in 1946, and the first film with a score by Ravi Shankar. The 8th MIAAC Film Festival also features special panels organized by the Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP) and New York Women in Film and Television (NYWIFT).

An additional panel called Shooting In India, is designed for US filmmakers interested in producing in India. The festival's centerpiece, 'Slumdog Millionaire', is the latest film by Danny Boyle, the acclaimed director of 28 Days, Trainspotting and other films. This Dickensian dazzler, winner of the Audience Award at the 2008 Toronto Film Festival, is about a young man from the slums of Bombay whose earnings on the Hindi version of 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire?' begin to mount to unsettling and gigantic proportions.

The festival will close with 'Little Zizou', award-winning screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala's directorial debut, presented by her long-time collaborator Mira Nair. Religious bigots and reformers clash in this funny satire set in the Fellini-esque world of India's educated, eccentric, miniscule Parsi community. Tickets for the festival go on sale from October 15.