It seems like every 2-3 months is bringing stronger reasons to believe that Bollywood and Hollywood want to have a working relationship!
The first time I posted about this was in February and then again in May.
Well, now it's August and there's loads more to report :)
Hollywood is starting to take the Indian market very seriously. In other words they've realized that there's a billion people in India, that the country's economy is developing very fast, the people of India are veeeery interested in cinema and Hollywood only has about 8% of the market... oooops...
The problem is that the way they've dominated Western markets just isn't going to work in India. In the words of Gareth Wigan, vice chairman of Columbia TriStar - "The importing of American films into India is not filling a gap (...) You're not bringing a dish to a bare table. You're bringing a dish to a table where you have to move a lot of other dishes to fit in, and that's not true in a lot of other countries."
Disney, Warner Bros and Columbia/Sony in particular seem to be seeing this 8% market problem and there's no longer any doubt - they're looking for opportunities!
So a number of things have been happening...
Disney have made a deal with Yash Raj films (which is one of the biggest production companies in Bollywood) to make animated films for Indian audiences.
They've also apparently been in touch with Shahrukh Khan, hoping to invest in his production company - Red Chillies Entertainment. And they're not the only ones either, apparently Sony and Fox are considering the same move!
There's also a number of projects which are essentially Bollywood films, but with some of the money coming from Hollywood.
The first of these to come out is Saawariya, with Columbia/Sony Entertainment behind it. It will be released this November. It's directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali (the director who also did Devdas) and will star Rani Mukherji and Salman Khan. The first teaser trailer is looking absolutely stunning. See it here.
Warner Bros is venturing out into Bollywood with "Made in China", which will be directed by Nikhil Advani (the director of Kal Ho Naa Ho) and will star Akshay Kumar.
Perhaps most excitingly, both of these films will have mainstream American distributors which makes their chances in the international box office much better! :)
But also Bollywood stars are being offered Hollywood movies!
Shilpa Shetty is rumoured to be in talks for the next James Bond movie, as well as possibly starring in a movie with Keanu Reeves. But there have been a number of other Bollywood stars approached for various projects, this article lists most of them.
Less dynamically, but Hollywood producers also seem to be thinking about Bollywood directors for their Hollywood projects. Santosh Sivan (the director of Asoka) has been approached with a script set in a colonial background.
Finally, perhaps less energetically, but Bollywood is making its own attempts at venturing into Hollywood and making use of their talents.
They have roped in a leading Hollywood VFX man into Pixion - a post-production studio in India. David Crawford is behind films like "Titanic", "Spiderman" and "Mission Impossible II"!
UTV is trying to make a big World War II movie with Vishal Bharadwaj (Omkara) as the director, hopefully bringing together Uma Thurman and Hrithik Roshan, but at the moment the project will remain in pre-production for a while yet.
UTV has also ventured into co-production with Fox on a Hollywood film - it will be Shyamalan's next film.
Not bad, huh? :-D
P.S. Not strictly related to the Hollywood-Bollywood issue, but I'll put it in anyway ;-P Danny Boyle's next film is set in India and he's supposed to have met Shahrukh Khan about it.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
The Wroclaw Film Festival (19-29 July)
I've been horribly neglecting my blog this past month :-/
There's lot of things to write about, but I'm going to start with my impressions from the Wroclaw film festival cause otherwise I'll totally forget them (that was at the end of last month!).
It was the 7th time this festival took place (the 2nd time that it took place in Wrocław - it's been moving to bigger cities as it's been growing). I've been attending this festival ever since the very first edition when it took place on just 4 screens in Sanok (now it's 14 screens!) and I guess one of the strongest impressions I got this time round is how important this festival has become. It's by far the biggest festival in Poland now (probably the biggest in this part of Europe actually). This year they showed 460 films of which 231 were full length feature films. I don't think there are any audience numbers available but it was definitely well over 100 thousand people.
When 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days opened the festival (it's the Romanian film that won the Cannes film festival this year), it struck me how respectfully the makers of the film were treating this festival and how interested they were in our response to the film. It's very much an international scale festival now!
But lets get to the films... I saw a lot of them obviously ;-P So I'll just cover the ones that got the strongest reactions from me (in no particular order - or rather in more or less the order I watched them).
The story of 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days is a girl in communist Romania trying to get an abortion. But it's actually not about abortion or communism at all. The real topic of the film is women and how little emotional support they have from men. I don't think it paints a saintly picture of women or anything like that. For most of the film they don't tell their men anything of what's bothering them and then when finally the men pressurize them to find out what's wrong it comes out in a way that if I were a man I wouldn't understand either ;-P And I think that's quite a fair portrayal of women (I think many of us are like that). But on the other hand you understand exactly why the women are so guarded. The atmosphere that men create just doesn't allow for that kind of openness and I think the film is an amazing portrayal of male chauvinism and it's awsome that a film like this was directed by a man :)
As my criteria for writing about a film is strong feelings, here's a film I had strong negative feelings about ;-P As the Shadow is an Italian film about an Italian woman (Claudia) who is learning Russian. She develops a crush on her teacher, Borys (a Ukrainian). They sort of end up together (although it's hard to say really) and then he asks a favour of her. His cousin (Olga) from the Ukraine is coming to Italy and as he's going to be out of town for a while, he wants Olga to stay at Claudia's house. Claudia finally agrees reluctantly and then finds that actually Olga is quite a nice guest. One day Olga goes out for the night and doesn't come back.
The director of the film was at the screening and I knew I wouldn't like the film the moment she started talking. She came out and said that she's glad that so many people came to the screening (in the standards of the festival it was actually rather empty) and then started saying that this film has traveled to many important festivals and won many awards (I checked - imdb lists just one festival and award and it's a very obscure one!). The whole way she approached us was with this air of superiority, which particularly struck me because just the day before Cristian Mungiu had been so modest and genuinely interested in how the Polish audience would react (and he was presenting a film that won the Golden Palm!!). I fully expected that the Italian director would approach her topic with the same air as she did her audience and was not disappointed.
I rolled my eyes when during a conversation about alcohol between Claudia and Olga, Olga says that in the Ukraine they drink because they're unhappy or because it's cold. Not to mention the names of the Ukrainian characters - Borys and Olga? er... great... (and guess which part of the Ukraine they were from - yes, you guessed right, Kiev) And that's not the worse part... The film has lots of Russian in it, but the director didn't even bother to make it sound right. Her Borys was an Italian and spoke with such a strong accent that even I heard it (and honestly, my Russian is almost non-existant!). Her Olga was a part Polish, part Italian actress who spoke with a slightly smaller accent, but still one I thought I could hear.
The catalogue description suggested that the point of the film was to de-stereotype Eastern Europeans, but instead the director didn't do even some basic homework on the Ukraine!
I also got to see two of Guy Maddin's films :D I developped an interest in him at previous editions of the festival. He's a Canadian director who is strongly influenced by German expressionist films from the silent era and has such bizzarre storylines that I feel unable to explain or repeat them ;-P They showed Brand Upon the Brain which is one of Maddin's more recent films. I don't feel able to convey to you what the film is like in any other way but by linking to the trailer:
The other Maddin film they showed was a 1992 one called Careful which was just as enjoyable and crazy :)
A hilarious and warm film that I saw was Irina Palm. It's a big European co-production about a middle aged lady who desperately needs money because her grandson is ill and so she starts earning money in the Soho area by wanking men off...
One of the biggest discoveries of the festival for many people was Hal Hartley (there was a full retrospective of his films). He was also present for the entire festival (and apparently doing lots of film watching as well :) ).
They actually had to move his films to a bigger screening room because all the people that were interested weren't managing to get in.
I didn't have particularly strong feelings about him myself, but he's definitely an American (independent) director worth discovering. His films have great dialogues and are very amusing portrayals of American society.
They had a small section of "cinema of dance" at the festival this year. While most of what I sat through was boring enough for me not to continue with that section, the first screening made a huge impression me. It was a a few films by the DV8 Physical Theatre - they're a British dance group and the way they approach both dance and film was fascinating for me.
As this is also something that has to be seen to be explained, here's the trailer for The Cost of Living:
And here's a scene from the film:
Disappointingly, there was only one Bollywood film this year and I'd already seen it on DVD, but it was still awsome to see it on the big screen. Omkara is an adaptation of Shakespeare's "Othello". It's a film where a lot of stars are acting against their image - especially Saif Ali Khan who is the ugly villain with yellow teeth (Saif usually plays cute romantic heroes :D ). Here's the trailer:
Another fun film was I'm a Cyborg, but that's Ok (Park Chan-Wook's latest film). It's a Korean film about a girl who thinks she's a cyborg.
Probably the most political film I watched at the festival was AFR. It's a Danish film made to test freedom of speech (or so the director told us :) ). When the Muslim cartoon issue came about in Denmark, the Danish (right wing) prime minister defended the right of Danish papers to publish such things. So the director of this film decided to test freedom of speech in Denmark and using all sorts of clips from TV, doing his own interviews with politicians (though not being entirely truthful with them about how the material would be used) and using actors to conduct other interviews, he created a film in which the Danish prime minister had been assassinated by his gay lover. He also made the film version of the prime minister an alter-globalist fighting for the rights of Third World countries (which is of course totally against what the right wing Rasmussen believes in). The director of the film was not punished in any way, so in his opinion Denmark passed the test ;)
A really nice Australian film that I saw was Japanese Story which is a sort of romance between an Australian girl and a Japanese businessman.
Something I really recommend people see once it releases is Persepolis. It's an animated film about a girl growing up in Iran and then emigrating to Europe. There's a lot of humour in it, but it's also packed full of Iranian history and culture. Here's a teaser trailer:
There's lot of things to write about, but I'm going to start with my impressions from the Wroclaw film festival cause otherwise I'll totally forget them (that was at the end of last month!).
It was the 7th time this festival took place (the 2nd time that it took place in Wrocław - it's been moving to bigger cities as it's been growing). I've been attending this festival ever since the very first edition when it took place on just 4 screens in Sanok (now it's 14 screens!) and I guess one of the strongest impressions I got this time round is how important this festival has become. It's by far the biggest festival in Poland now (probably the biggest in this part of Europe actually). This year they showed 460 films of which 231 were full length feature films. I don't think there are any audience numbers available but it was definitely well over 100 thousand people.
When 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days opened the festival (it's the Romanian film that won the Cannes film festival this year), it struck me how respectfully the makers of the film were treating this festival and how interested they were in our response to the film. It's very much an international scale festival now!
But lets get to the films... I saw a lot of them obviously ;-P So I'll just cover the ones that got the strongest reactions from me (in no particular order - or rather in more or less the order I watched them).
The story of 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days is a girl in communist Romania trying to get an abortion. But it's actually not about abortion or communism at all. The real topic of the film is women and how little emotional support they have from men. I don't think it paints a saintly picture of women or anything like that. For most of the film they don't tell their men anything of what's bothering them and then when finally the men pressurize them to find out what's wrong it comes out in a way that if I were a man I wouldn't understand either ;-P And I think that's quite a fair portrayal of women (I think many of us are like that). But on the other hand you understand exactly why the women are so guarded. The atmosphere that men create just doesn't allow for that kind of openness and I think the film is an amazing portrayal of male chauvinism and it's awsome that a film like this was directed by a man :)
As my criteria for writing about a film is strong feelings, here's a film I had strong negative feelings about ;-P As the Shadow is an Italian film about an Italian woman (Claudia) who is learning Russian. She develops a crush on her teacher, Borys (a Ukrainian). They sort of end up together (although it's hard to say really) and then he asks a favour of her. His cousin (Olga) from the Ukraine is coming to Italy and as he's going to be out of town for a while, he wants Olga to stay at Claudia's house. Claudia finally agrees reluctantly and then finds that actually Olga is quite a nice guest. One day Olga goes out for the night and doesn't come back.
The director of the film was at the screening and I knew I wouldn't like the film the moment she started talking. She came out and said that she's glad that so many people came to the screening (in the standards of the festival it was actually rather empty) and then started saying that this film has traveled to many important festivals and won many awards (I checked - imdb lists just one festival and award and it's a very obscure one!). The whole way she approached us was with this air of superiority, which particularly struck me because just the day before Cristian Mungiu had been so modest and genuinely interested in how the Polish audience would react (and he was presenting a film that won the Golden Palm!!). I fully expected that the Italian director would approach her topic with the same air as she did her audience and was not disappointed.
I rolled my eyes when during a conversation about alcohol between Claudia and Olga, Olga says that in the Ukraine they drink because they're unhappy or because it's cold. Not to mention the names of the Ukrainian characters - Borys and Olga? er... great... (and guess which part of the Ukraine they were from - yes, you guessed right, Kiev) And that's not the worse part... The film has lots of Russian in it, but the director didn't even bother to make it sound right. Her Borys was an Italian and spoke with such a strong accent that even I heard it (and honestly, my Russian is almost non-existant!). Her Olga was a part Polish, part Italian actress who spoke with a slightly smaller accent, but still one I thought I could hear.
The catalogue description suggested that the point of the film was to de-stereotype Eastern Europeans, but instead the director didn't do even some basic homework on the Ukraine!
I also got to see two of Guy Maddin's films :D I developped an interest in him at previous editions of the festival. He's a Canadian director who is strongly influenced by German expressionist films from the silent era and has such bizzarre storylines that I feel unable to explain or repeat them ;-P They showed Brand Upon the Brain which is one of Maddin's more recent films. I don't feel able to convey to you what the film is like in any other way but by linking to the trailer:
The other Maddin film they showed was a 1992 one called Careful which was just as enjoyable and crazy :)
A hilarious and warm film that I saw was Irina Palm. It's a big European co-production about a middle aged lady who desperately needs money because her grandson is ill and so she starts earning money in the Soho area by wanking men off...
One of the biggest discoveries of the festival for many people was Hal Hartley (there was a full retrospective of his films). He was also present for the entire festival (and apparently doing lots of film watching as well :) ).
They actually had to move his films to a bigger screening room because all the people that were interested weren't managing to get in.
I didn't have particularly strong feelings about him myself, but he's definitely an American (independent) director worth discovering. His films have great dialogues and are very amusing portrayals of American society.
They had a small section of "cinema of dance" at the festival this year. While most of what I sat through was boring enough for me not to continue with that section, the first screening made a huge impression me. It was a a few films by the DV8 Physical Theatre - they're a British dance group and the way they approach both dance and film was fascinating for me.
As this is also something that has to be seen to be explained, here's the trailer for The Cost of Living:
And here's a scene from the film:
Disappointingly, there was only one Bollywood film this year and I'd already seen it on DVD, but it was still awsome to see it on the big screen. Omkara is an adaptation of Shakespeare's "Othello". It's a film where a lot of stars are acting against their image - especially Saif Ali Khan who is the ugly villain with yellow teeth (Saif usually plays cute romantic heroes :D ). Here's the trailer:
Another fun film was I'm a Cyborg, but that's Ok (Park Chan-Wook's latest film). It's a Korean film about a girl who thinks she's a cyborg.
Probably the most political film I watched at the festival was AFR. It's a Danish film made to test freedom of speech (or so the director told us :) ). When the Muslim cartoon issue came about in Denmark, the Danish (right wing) prime minister defended the right of Danish papers to publish such things. So the director of this film decided to test freedom of speech in Denmark and using all sorts of clips from TV, doing his own interviews with politicians (though not being entirely truthful with them about how the material would be used) and using actors to conduct other interviews, he created a film in which the Danish prime minister had been assassinated by his gay lover. He also made the film version of the prime minister an alter-globalist fighting for the rights of Third World countries (which is of course totally against what the right wing Rasmussen believes in). The director of the film was not punished in any way, so in his opinion Denmark passed the test ;)
A really nice Australian film that I saw was Japanese Story which is a sort of romance between an Australian girl and a Japanese businessman.
Something I really recommend people see once it releases is Persepolis. It's an animated film about a girl growing up in Iran and then emigrating to Europe. There's a lot of humour in it, but it's also packed full of Iranian history and culture. Here's a teaser trailer:
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