MUMBAI: Justin Timberlake starrer The Social Network will be the opening film at the 12th Mumbai Film Festival (MFF).
Organised by the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image (MAMI), the festival will open with David Fincher’s The Social Network which is about the birth of social networking website, Facebook. The film will have its first screening at a film festival.
The MAMI committee led by chairman Shyam Benegal, Reliance Big Pictures Amit Khanna, MAMI selection committee chairman Basu Chatterjee and MAMI director Srinivasav Narayan unveiled the line up for the 12th annual MFF, which consists of two hundred films from fifty eight countries. All the international films to be screened in the main section of this year’s festival will be Indian, Asian or world premiers.
Some of the other films to be screened at the festival are Somewhere, Winter Vacation, Of Gods and Men , How I Ended This Summer, Bunraku, Company Men, Honey, The Mosquito Net, Route Irish, Inside Job, Letters to Julliette, Certified Copy and Poetry.
This year the focus will be on European and Japanese cinema. The festival will feature a retrospective of Japanese films besides World Cinema and Dimensions Mumbai (where filmmakers under 25 years of age make a short film on Mumbai). Celebration of Japanese cinema will feature a collection of almost 45 Japanese films. Benegal said, “We have around 45 Japanese films, which are winners of many international festivals.”
This year’s jury is an all woman jury that includes filmmaker Jane Campion, co-producer of three Harry Potter films Tanya Seghatchian, Iranian filmmaker Samira Makhalbaf, South Korean actress Yoon Jeon-Heeand and actress Suhasini Maniratnam.
Benegal added, “We have an unprecedented, superb all women jury which is highly celebrated.”
The festival will also have a Film Business Centre where distributors from around the world, like Pathe, Studio Canal, Icon, Fortissimo,Metro films,IM Global, Pioniwa, MK2, Mementa Films International, Visit Films, Umedia, The Match Factory,Bavaria FilmsInternational.Beta FilmsWide Management, YTV, Visual Media and others will be present to interact with filmmakers looking for worldwide buyers for their films.
According to the MAMI committee the festival has become bigger than previous editions and the total prize money to be won by filmmakers competing in the festival has also been raised to Rs1 crore. Besides that, the festival has also acquired an enviable list of films from across the globe to be showcased this year.
Benegal said, “This time we have got the cream of the world cinema. We have the best films of the past one – one and a half years. We feel the films we have for MAMI, are worthy of being showcased to a city like Mumbai.”
“This is also the first time that there will be a world premier of a film, in MAMI. The film in question is a Danish film called Above the street Below the water,” added Khanna.
MAMI will be honoring Oliver Stone with the International Lifetime Award, while actor, director, producer Manoj Kumar will be honored with the Indian Lifetime Achievement Award.
This year the poster of the festival has been designed by artist Chintan Upadhyay. The festival is all set to open on 21 October and will continue till 28 October, 2010.
