MUMBAI: The fourth annual 2007 South Asian International Film Festival, which will be held from 3-9 October, 2007 in New York City, will close with Bhavna Talwar’s directorial debut Dharm.

The movie will be aired at Loews Cineplex in Lincoln Square on 9 October, 2007. Set in the oldest and holiest city of India, Varanasi, Pundit Ram Narayan Chaturvedi is a Hindu Brahmin priest who lives by his belief in the ‘true Hindu way of life’. One day an abandoned infant comes into the priest’s life and home. He adopts the child and through the years the child fills the priest’s life with joy and laughter until the day he learns that child is a Muslim. Can this four-year-old child challenge four thousand years of religion?

The movie stars Pankaj Kapur and Supriya Pathak Kapur amongst others.

First time director Bhavna Talwar is a former journalist and advertising producer who took on the ambitious topic of religious fanaticism and caste conflicts for her first feature film. “It’s a film that transcends the borders of geographies and leaves people with a thought and message – something that not very many films can claim today,” she said.

Talwar received critical acclaim from the closing night of the World Cinema of India presentation at the 2007 Cannes film festival to being one of five directors nominated for the prestigious GUCCI award at the 2007 Venice Film Festival.

“We are honored to present the first project of such a highly acclaimed woman director and we look forward to her upcoming projects like the production she is working on with Oscar nominated actress Joan Allen,” said SAIF Festival director Manjri Srivastava.