ACF 1268: RA.ONE now available on Bollywood Hits On Demand

Bollywood'sBiggest Fall Blockbuster Exclusively Available

On BOLLYWOOD HITSON DEMAND Before Its DVD Release

Bollywood’s blockbuster hit Ra.One, starring international sensations Shah RukhKhan (in dual roles) and Kareena Kapoor, is now available exclusively onBollywood Hits On Demand, prior to its DVD release later this month, less than sixweeks after it’s theatrical release.

Bollywood Hits on Demand, the subscription video on demand servicefeaturing Bollywood blockbuster movies and music, is available to Comcast,Cablevision, Cox, Time Warner, CenturyLink and RCN cable customers in selectareas in the U.S. market.  The movie will remain available on Bollywood Hits On Demand until January 5,2012.  For Comcast and Cox customers, Ra.One will also be available toorder on an a la carte basis for $4.99. 

“Ra.One had a record opening in the U.S., beating those of recentreleases, and we’re thrilled to be able to offer this super blockbuster hit tocable platforms prior to its DVD release. We remain committed to offering thebest of Bollywood movies and music to our on demand customers,” said Ken Naz, President of ErosInternational, USA. 

Ra. One was released theatrically on October 26, 2011,with astounding box officeresults, making it one of the most successful Diwali openings in Indian cinemaby grossing more than $35 million worldwide. This Bollywood blockbusteris a sci-fi,action film filled with stunning visual effects directed by Anubhav Sinha and starring Shah Rukh Khan, Arjun Rampal andKareena Kapoor.  The film also features awidely acclaimed soundtrack produced by Vishal & Shekhar, featuring Grammyaward nominee Akon in the hit Bollywood song “Chamak Chalo.”

ACF 993: "Karma to Nirvana" doc to premiere at NY Indian Film Festival

“Karma to Nirvana,” the second installment in
Vikas Khanna’s HOLY KITCHENS documentary series,
set to premiere at the longest-running,
most prestigious Indian film festival in the U.S.

“God comes to the hungry in the form of food,” said the ‘Father of India’ Mahatma Gandhi. It is this philosophy which has compelled Chef Vikas Khanna to explore the symbiotic intersection of food and religion in his documentary series HOLY KITCHENS. “At any given time somewhere on Earth, people are gathering to share food in the name of God. This is spiritual sustenance, meant to bring us closer together and closer to the Creator,” says Khanna. “This is the story of Holy Kitchens.”

“Karma to Nirvana,” the second installment in the series which focuses specifically on Hinduism, Lord Krishna’s spiritual practices, and the principles of KARMA and NIRVANA as set forth in the Bhagavad- Gita, will premiere at the New York Indian Film Festival on Saturday, May 7, 2011, at 12:30 p.m. in Tribeca Cinemas’ Theater Two (54 Varick Street).

The film features interviews with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Arun Gandhi, Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, Shaunaka Rishi Das, Aroon Shivdasani, Lynn McGuire, Scott Carney and Anju Bhargava. It is written and narrated by Andrew Blackmore-Dobbyn, directed by Anubhav Bhardwaj, and co-directed by Francisco Aguila. “Karma to Nirvana” is a Junoon Hospitality presentation (TRT: 48 min).

Vikas Khanna’s journey in the documentary takes us right into the soup kitchens of Amma, Mata Amritanandamayi Devi’s ashram in Kerala, where Amma blesses thousands of people daily with motherly hugs and serves them meals with her own hands. “We have to help the hungry as best we can,” says Amma. “We have to see that feeding the hungry is no less than the worship of God.”

Subsequently, the documentary highlights the magnanimous charity work of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) in Delhi and other parts of the world. Their “Food for All” programs feed hundreds of thousands of hungry children and adults, and Khanna personally cooks in the ISKCON kitchens in London, as a way for him to give back.

ISKCON’s mid-day meal program in India provides free meals to children in schools, thereby helping them get an education and ensuring a brighter future for them, as well as for India. According to the Bhagavad-Gita, “sharing food is the highest form of Karma.” It is this selfless service to others that eventually leads Hindus to the path to higher spirituality and, thus, to Nirvana.

“True Business,” the first film in the HOLY KITCHENS series focused on the Sikh religion and how its temples provide free food through its kitchens, known as “langars,” to everyone who comes, regardless of their beliefs. With commentary by Dr. Deepak Chopra, the film played to a sold-out audience at New York’s Sikh International Film Festival in fall 2010. Next year’s film is titled “The Moon of Eïd” and will explore Ramadan in the Islamic faith from the Middle East to Europe and across the world.

“Our aim is to make people aware of this commonality of the world’s religious traditions and to illuminate the differences in a way that will engender mutual tolerance and respect,” says Khanna. “Taken together, these films are our offering to the dialog that is meant to create more peace and harmony in the world.”

For more information about the HOLY KITCHENS series, upcoming films, and screening schedules, please log on to www.holykitchens.com.

About Vikas: Vikas Khanna was raised in Amritsar, India, where he grew up surrounded by large family feasts, the seasonal produce fresh from the fields of Punjab, and of course, his grandmother’s traditional home cooking. It was at his grandmother’s side that he began to learn the intricacies of Indian cuisine. He started his own catering business, Lawrence Gardens, at the age of 17. Vikas has received rave reviews for his cooking in The New York Times and many other publications. His current restaurant work includes Junoon Restaurant, the Café at the Rubin Museum of Art, and Flavors and Feasts Catering. Upon his graduation from the Welcomgroup Graduate School of Hotel Administration, Vikas went on to train under renowned chefs of Taj Group of Hotels, Oberoi, Leela Group, and many more.

He has authored several books including “The Spice Story of India” and “Modern Indian Cooking.” His next book, “Flavors First,” will be published in 2011 by Lake Isle Press. His following book is titled “Return to the Rivers: A Culinary Pilgrimage Through the Himalayas,” with a foreword by His Holiness, The Dalai Lama. Vikas has also been a guest judge and chef on Gordon Ramsay’s television shows for Fox, Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, Food Network and the Martha Stewart Show among others. He is the recipient of numerous national and international awards and is also an honorary member of many foundations, including the World Peace Society. The full scope of Khanna’s activities can be found on www.vkhanna.com.

ACF 782: 10th Annual MIAAC Film Festival ends in New York with awards ceremony

10th Annual MIAAC Film Festival Wraps Up with Awards Ceremony
for Best Picture, Actors, and Director

Five days of sold-out feature, shorts, and documentary screenings, “Bhumika: The Roles of Smita Patil,” a retrospective of the late actress’ films, in partnership with the Film Society at Lincoln Center, nightly red-carpet events, film industry panels, and celebrity-packed after parties all came to a close on Sunday, November 14 with a prestigious awards ceremony at the SVA Theater in Manhattan, following the closing night film “Cooking with Stella." The longest-running, most prestigious Indian film festival in the country, the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council (MIAAC) Film Festival, recognized noteworthy directing, writing, and acting in the following categories:

* Best Picture – “The Well (Vihir)”
* Best Actor – Ajay Naidu, “Ashes”
* Best Actress – Seema Biswas, “Cooking with Stella”
* Best Director – Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK, “Shor”
* Best Screenplay – Rituparno Ghosh, “Memories in March”
* Best Documentary – “Ganesh, Boy Wonder,” Director Srinivas Krishna
* Best Short Film – “Charulata…A Sequel…of the Life Untold!” Director Sangeeta Padmanabhan
* NYU @ MIAAC: Mobile Bollywood – Directors: Anna South, Casey Knight, and Raymond Wei
* Special Achievement Award for Significant Contribution to the Globalization of Indian Music – presented to Oscar and Grammy-award winning composer A.R. Rahman and accepted by director Mani Ratnam

The jury comprised of some of the most well-known critics, actors, directors, and academics in world cinema including: Claus Mueller, Kathleen Carroll, Jerry Carlson, Madhur Jaffrey, Parag Amladi, Ashish Avikunthak, Vinay Chowdhry, Udayan Gupta, Poorna Jagannathan, Kavery Kaul, Joseph Mathew-Varghese, Zenobia Shroff, Ingrid Scheib-Rothbart, Parvez Sharma, Rahul Bose, Wayne Sharpe, and Nilita Vachani.

Celebrities who attended the 10th annual festival included: Mani Ratnam, Suhasini Maniratnam, Mira Nair, Dilip Mehta, Seema Biswas, Sendhil Ramamurthy, Madhur Jaffrey, Ekta Kapoor, Tusshar Kapoor, Padma Lakshmi, Rahul Bose, Salman Rushdie, Aasif Mandvi, Samrat Chakrabarti, Manu Narayan, Tannishtha Chatterjeee, Seema Biswas, Ajay Naidu, Arun Vaidyanathan, Sarita Choudhry, Sanjoy Nag, Srijit Mukherjee, and many others.

About the Indo-American Arts Council: The Indo-American Arts Council is a registered not-for-profit arts organization passionately dedicated to showcasing, building awareness, and celebrating artists of Indian origin in the performing, visual and literary arts. Annual festivals of art, dance, play writing and film are scheduled through the year, with several special events and book launches. For further information please visit www.iaac.us. The IAAC Film Festival was born in the aftermath of 9/11 in response to Mayor Giuliani’s call to New Yorkers to help rebuild a limping city. The First Annual film Festival opened its doors with Film Diaspora Godfather Ismail Merchant and closed with New York’s favorite Indian filmmaker Mira Nair. Four years ago, Mahindra & Mahindra joined forces with the IAAC Film Festival by becoming the lead sponsor, changing the name of the festival to The MIAAC Film Festival. For further information please visit www.miaacfilmfest.org.

About The Mahindra Group: Mahindra embarked on its journey in 1945 by assembling the Willys Jeep in India and is now a $7.1 billion Indian multi-national company. It employs more than 100,000 people across the globe and enjoys a leadership position in utility vehicles, tractors, and information technology, with a significant and growing presence in financial services, tourism, infrastructure development, and trade and logistics. Today, The Mahindra Group is an embodiment of global experience and enjoys a strong corporate brand image.

Mahindra is the only Indian company among the top tractor brands in the world. It is today a full-range player with a presence in almost every segment of the automobile industry, from two-wheelers to CVs, UVs, SUVs, and sedans. Mahindra recently acquired majority stake in REVA Electric Car Co. Ltd. (now called Mahindra REVA), strengthening its position in the Electric Vehicles domain.

The Mahindra Group expanded its IT portfolio when Tech Mahindra acquired the leading global business and information technology services company, Satyam Computer Services. The company is now known as Mahindra Satyam.

Mahindra is also one of the few Indian companies to receive an A+ GRI checked rating for its first Sustainability Report for the year 2007-08 and has also received the A+ GRI rating for the year 2008-09.

About The Film Society at Lincoln Center: The Film Society of Lincoln Center was founded in 1969 to celebrate American and international cinema, to recognize and support new directors, and to enhance the awareness, accessibility and understanding of film. Advancing this mandate today, the Film Society hosts two distinguished festivals. The New York Film Festival annually premieres films from around the world and has introduced the likes of François Truffaut, R.W. Fassbinder, Jean-Luc Godard, Pedro Almodóvar, Martin Scorsese, and Wong Kar-Wai to the United States. New Directors/New Films, co-presented by the Museum of Modern Art, focuses on emerging film talents. Since 1972, when the Film Society honored Charles Chaplin, its annual Gala Tribute celebrates an actor or filmmaker who has helped distinguish cinema as an art form. Additionally, the Film Society presents a year-round calendar of programming at its Walter Reade Theater and offers insightful film writing to a worldwide audience through Film Comment magazine. For more information, visit: www.filmlinc.com

ACF 770: The Japanese Wife to be shown at School of Visual Arts on November 13, 2010

The Japanese Wife
Directed by Aparna Sen
With Rahul Bose, Raima Sen, Chigasu Takaku,
Mousumi Chatterjee, and Rudranil Ghosh
India, 2009, 105 minutes
NY Premiere
In English, Bengali, and Japanese (with English subtitles)
When: Saturday, November 13, 6:00 PM
Where: SVA Theatre 2 (Beatrice)
333 West 23rd Street, New York City

Director Aparna Sen and lead actor Rahul Bose will be in attendance.

A delicate – and improbable love story about three gentle and shy souls. Snehamoy, a school teacher in the beautiful Sunderbans, writes letters to Miyage, a sweet shy Japanese girl in Yokohama. Over these letters, they fall in love and get married despite having never met. Sandhya, a widow, takes refuge in Snehamoy’s home and is soon always by his side, bringing a piquant twist to this home in the Sunderbans, and the love between Snehamoy and Miyage. Will Sandhya find her solace with Snehamoy? Or will life finally unite Snehamoy and Miyage?

TICKETS
$15 / $12 Japan Society members.
PLEASE ENTER the following code to obtain the discount: MIAACBRK

To order tickets online, click here.

This screening is part of the 10th Annual Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival.

ACF 271: NY's FSLC presents Satyajit Ray retro April 15th thru 30th, 2009

First Light: Satyajit Ray from

the Apu Trilogy to the Calcutta Trilogy

“To have not seen the films of Ray is to have lived in the world without ever having seen the moon and the sun.” - Akira Kurosawa

One of the unfortunately all-too-rare retrospectives of the films of Indian master filmmaker Satyajit Ray begins tomorrow at the Walter Reade Theater of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. It will last 16 Days and offer over 20 films, many sporting new prints. The following two paragraphs from the FSLC sum the series up nicely:

"Little excuse is ever needed to re-examine the work of one of cinema’s greatest auteurs, but the recent spike of interest in India — from its propitious emergence as a major economic power to the worldwide success of Slumdog Millionaire — make this an especially apt moment to witness and celebrate the achievements of Ray.

Scene from "Charulata"

The series spans the Apu Trilogy in the 50s (Pather Panchali, Aparajito, The World of Apu) through the Calcutta Trilogy in the 70s (The Adversary, Company Limited, The Middleman) and features 1960’s Devi (“One of Satyajit Ray’s greatest early films” – Jonathan Rosenbaum), 1964’s Charulata (“Surpasses everything Ray has ever achieved before” – Richard Roud, NYFF) and many new 35mm prints: The Music Room (1958), The Expedition (1962), The Coward and the Holy Man (1965), The Hero (1966), and more."

Complete program info, including descriptions of each film, showtimes, and links to order tickets is available at the Film Society of New York website

Must reading: Terrence Rafferty's New York Times article

ACF 172: Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival in NYC 11.05-09.08

Bohman Irani and Zenobia Shroff in Sooni Taraporevala's Little Zizou

(Photo Credit: Aparna Jayakumar)

The 8th Annual Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council (MIAAC) Film Festival will bring Independent Indian and Diaspora Film Premieres to New York, Nov. 5-9.

Five special events will accompany the 32 films featured during the upcoming film festival. They include discussions, seminars, a live concert, and a special screening of SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE. Each event contributes to the MIAAC Film Festival’s mission to recognize and celebrate Indian Independent and Diaspora films in North America.

60x60 SECS
Wednesday, November 5–9, 10AM-6 PM
Aicon Gallery at 35 Great Jones Street

60x60 is the first project for 360degreesTV from Motiroti, the London-based international arts organization. It is comprised of sixty one-minute films by established and emerging artists from the South Asian Diaspora – twenty each from Britain, India and Pakistan. Shown daily as a single channel installation, the films uncover new voices and images, presenting comic, unsettling and arresting stories of everyday life and global events and focus on the meaning of ‘home and boundaries.’

BOMBAY/NY: AN EVENING WITH MIRA NAIR AND SUKETU MEHTA

Friday, November 7 at 7 PM
The Times Center, 242 W. 41st Street

Co-presented with the Museum of the Moving Image at The Times Center, and moderated by the Museum's Chief Curator, David Schwartz, Nair, the acclaimed director of The Namesake, Monsoon Wedding, and Salaam Bombay! who is collaborating on several film projects with Mehta, the author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, will discuss perspectives on the vibrant cultures of the two cities, accompanied by excerpts from Nair's films

THE FRONTIER GANDHI: BADSHAH KHAN, A TORCH FOR PEACE

Saturday, November 8 at 6 PM

Allen Room, Jazz at Lincoln Center

A special screening of Teri C. McLuhan's extraordinary story of the Muslim peacemaker who raised a 100,000 strong non-violent army in his fight alongside Mahatma Gandhi for Indian independence and religious tolerance. The screening will be followed by a concert for peace by the acclaimed composer who did the music score of the film, David Amram, and his musicians.

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

Saturday, November 8 at 8 PM

ImaginAsian Theater, 59th St at 1st Ave

The festival's centerpiece, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, is the latest film by Danny Boyle, the acclaimed director of 28 Days, Trainspotting and other films. This Dickensian dazzler, winner of the Audience Award at the 2008 Toronto Film Festival, is about a young man from the slums of Bombay whose earnings on the Hindi version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? begin to mount to unsettling and gigantic proportions. The event is sponsored by Filmi.

BOSE: THE FORGOTTEN HERO screening and discussion
Saturday, November 8, Noon
Asia Society

Still shrouded in controversy and mystery, the gripping story of Indian national hero "Netaji" Subhas Chandra Bose gets an epic treatment from veteran director Shyam Benegal. In his telling of a dramatic story that has all but disappeared from public memory, Benegal follows the leader who diverged from Gandhi (who once remarked that he had two political sons, Jawaharlal Nehru and "that mischievous Netaji") to meet with Adolf Hitler and General Hideki Tojo in his fight for Indian independence. Benegal follows the astonishing life of the man who created India's first national army that battled the Allied forces in the jungles of Burma, until his mysterious death in 1945. A discussion with Director Shyam Benegal will follow the screening.

Tickets to these special events and other films are available now. For a list of films, times, locations, and more, visit: http://www.iaac.us/MIAAC2008/film_details.htm.