Mumbai: Film Bazaar is ready to take stories that speak of the other India to international audiences. Twelve feature and 10 non-feature film projects of Indian stories by filmmakers from India and abroad will be presented in the projects section to facilitate collaborations in the realms of production and distribution of these films.
Delegates are required to register for Film Bazaar prior to 15 November, 2008 in order to enable inclusion of their profile in the Delegate Manual of Film Bazaar.
At the core of Film Bazaar are the film and documentary projects that are looking for finance and sales. The Documentary section is a new section. At a time when television channels are booming in India, original Indian non-fiction content creators deserve a platform to tell their innovative and at times, remarkably brave and inspiring stories.
This year at the Documentary section of the co-production market at Film Bazaar, there will be films on contemporary Indian subjects from across the length and breadth of the country.
Projects on Environmental issues are:
· Green Oscar-winner Mike Pandey looks at the global disappearance of Bees and the inevitable impact on the survival of the human race on the planet.
· Pramod Mathur’s project on melting glaciers in India and China echoes the same fears and presents a human picture as to how the steady decline of natural resources will have far reaching effects on us all.
II Filmmakers with projects on young Indians and their choices as they work towards realizing their ambitions, include:
· Preeti Mankar’s Mad About IIT – JEE which looks at the process of applying to IIT
· Nitin K’s Gang of 7 follows friends from different parts of the country who met in college and migrated together to Kerala to work for an MNC
· AIM Television’s Killer Punch is the journey of a female boxer in Kolkata, training for the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi.
The Feature Film section of the Co-Production market showcases some of the best filmmaking talent from the country, both established and newly discovered, through 12 feature film projects that aim to tell hidden and unseen stories of contemporary India. These stories feature brave and memorable characters, journeys that are epic and emotional, stories from communities that are nestled on the fringes, and playful looks at the relationships between men and women, and between parents and their grown-up children.
Projects in this section include:
· Projects of Camera D’Or winners Shaji Karun & Murali Nair
· Projects of Contemporary, cutting-edge filmmakers Anurag Kashyap (Black Friday), Ashim Ahluwalia (John & Jane), Rajan Khosa (Dance of the Wind).
· Indra Sinha’s Booker nominated novel Animal’s People is up for adaptation by English director Michael Anderson.
· Suresh Productions (Hyderabad) and A Bellyful of Dreams co-production – a Tamil / Hindi bilingual – Samuel Kartikeya – about a vigilante who’s goal is to cleanse society from evil.
Film Bazaar continues its partnership with the European Producers Club who bring in a slate of films that have an India connect and are looking for partners in India. Their projects, up for finance and other partnerships, are:
* an adaptation of Vikas Swarups’s new book Six Suspects (by independent film company Starfield and producer Paul Raphael)
* West is West, the sequel to East is East
* Debutant director Amit Kumar’s feature debut. Kumar is an FTII graduate whose short film Bypass has impressed filmmaking bodies the world over – has a project which the UK Film Council and Yaffle Films have developed, The Monsoon Shootout, about a rookie cop with an anti-extortion unit of the Mumbai Crime Branch
* Night in Bombay is a romantic thriller set in Bombay in 1930, adapted by John Gardyne from the novel by Pulitzer Prize winner, Louis Bromfield. The film to be directed by Mahesh Mathai (Bhopal Express, Broken Thread) it is a romantic thriller set in 1930s Bombay
* The adaptation of Kabuliwala, based on the story by Rabindranath Tagore, to be made by Afghani director Atiq Rahimi (Earth and Ashes)
Indian Panorama feature and non-feature films being showcased in IFFI 2008 will also be promoted in the market to identify sales opportunities for the same.
A Business Conclave is being organized in the market, which will be co-hosted by Screen International, the international media partners of Film Bazaar. The conclave will include sessions and panel discussions on international and domestic film financing and distribution avenues for Indian and foreign films. The speakers include Michael Werner, Co-Chairman, Fortissimo Films, Gary Hamilton, Arclight Films, Anant Singh (Video Vision, South Africa), Manmohan Shetty (Walkwater Media), Sunil Doshi.
