VENICE: When Mira Nair’s ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ opened 69th Venice Film Festival, the film was applauded with a ten minute standing ovation.

To pass on her compliments, a diminutive old lady kept asking others around where she could find the director of the film she had just seen. After finding out, she came towards Mira’s table and held both her hands. In her smooth Italian accent, she said, “I am Gillo Pontecorvo’s widow, and I have come to tell you that Gillo lives in you.”

Interestingly, when Mira Nair was recently asked about something that inspires her as a creative person, she had expressed, “There is one film that has inspired me for decades—the only film in the world I wished I had directed, a path breaking film that taught me to show both sides of a conflict with equal intelligence, pain and love. This is Gillo Pontecorvo’s great classic about the fight for Algerian Independence: The Battle of Algiers.”

Meanwhile PVR Pictures has pushed the India release date of ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ to May 17th 2013. The movie was earlier set to release on May 10th.

Starring Kate Hudson, Kiefer Sutherland, Liev Schreiber, Riz Ahmed, Shabana Azmi and Om Puri, the film is the story of a young man chasing corporate success on Wall Street. Post September 2011 tragedy in America, he finds himself embroiled in a conflict between his American Dream, a hostage crisis, and the enduring call of his family’s homeland.