The 12th annual Asian film festival – Tongues on Fire – will host its launch this week.

It will close with the premiere of acclaimed director Sangeeta Datta’s Life Goes On. But the festival opens on 5th with an awards ceremony and lasts until 14th March.
Continue reading…

by Jaspreet Pandohar
Freelance writer

In the current economic climate it may seem a tad risky to start a new business. When that venture happens to be within the unpredictable entertainment industry it’s probably even more of a perilous idea.

But that’s exactly what two daring young Londoners have done by creating a new UK-based film distribution company.

This month will see two new releases by them: The Pool and Made In Pakistan (more details at the end).

A US-India co-production directed by filmmaker Chris Smith, The Pool stars legendary Indian actor Nana Patekar and is a tale of a boy’s obsession with a glittering swimming pool and how it changes four lives in India.
Continue reading…

British cinema receipts for a Bollywood film have helped it break overseas box-office records.

3 Idiots, starring Aamir Khan, is seventh on the UK cinema charts, taking £331,166 last week across the UK.
Continue reading…

Gurinder Chadha’s upcoming film It’s a Wonderful Afterlife will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival later this month.

The director made the announcement this week.

But the film will screen outside of the competition during the festival, which takes place in Park City, USA from 21st January until 31st January.

She said: “I am delighted to premiere my film at Sundance having had such a long and happy relationship with the festival.”
Continue reading…

Modelling agencies fleecing Asian women across the country are likely to face strong penalties with new government legislation.

The government is planning to announce that modelling agencies would be banned from charging up-front fees.

The plans were aimed at “unscrupulous agents”, a minister said, who asked women for fees in advance of any modelling work.

In most cases the work never comes through and women pay extortionate fees for being on the register.
Continue reading…

A London based model has made her debut in the Bollywood film Love Aaj Kal alongside actor Saif Ali Khan.

23 year-old Poonam Mehmi (pictured) got the part through an agency, but came to prominence after being crowned Miss India Worldwide UK earlier this year.

She has a small role in one of the songs.

She told the Manchester based Asian News newspaper: “I was called to go for a casting. There were so many girls who had gone for the part but two days later I was told that I had got it.”
Continue reading…

Brick Lane actress Tannishtha Chatterjee (pictured) is starring in a new film doing film festival rounds across the world.

Road, Movie recently became the only Indian feature to be invited as a special presentation to the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival.
Continue reading…

The media skills agency Skillset is to fund a nationwide programme to give film companies across the UK access to the business training that will help them seize the opportunities of the ‘digital age’.

The six-month programme will provide successful applicants with the knowledge, skills and experience needed to develop their own digital media technology, content, marketing and business strategies.
Continue reading…

A month long exhibition starting this week will look to challenge western media’s view of Pakistan “as a rogue nuclear state suffering from conflict, extremism, natural disaster and sporadic martial law”.

Organised by the Museum of Non-Participation, it will offer a newspaper supplement, an exhibition, a film and a diverse programme of film screenings, language classes, readings, a poetry symposium, makeovers, soap-opera script-writing workshops, talks and discussions.
Continue reading…

The actress Lisa Ray, famous for her role in the film Water, has contracted a rare form of blood cancer called Multiple Myeloma.

She has started writing about her experiences in trying to deal with the cancer while getting treatment in Canada. The 37 year old Toronto-born has starred in several British films.

The rare form of cancer, which destroys blood cells, is treatable but incurable. She revealed that she had privately been fighting the cancer since being diagnosed in June this year.
Continue reading…

One of India’s most critically acclaimed and popular films – Mother India – has been remixed, re-edited and rescored into a 45-minute silent film. (A preview is below)

The work is a project by Kala Phool, an arts and development agency, which has brought in DJ Tigerstyle to reinterpret the score through a unique live performance.

The resulting work, called MI21, is currently on a sell-out tour across the UK.
Continue reading…

The Cineforum is announcing a call for films to be featured at a two-day climate change event, to be held in London on 4th-5th December 2009. It serves as a showcase for both the mainstream and from lesser known sections of society.

Criteria: All types of film, from all genres, from short to feature length, will be accepted. There is no submission fee. The call for entries is open until 15th September 2009
More info

Slowly but surely Mandeep Singh Jutla is making a name for himself.

The music video director (pictured, right) recently became the first British Asian to be signed by international agency Colonel Blimp – behind videos such as Bonkers by Dizzee Rascal, Crazy by U2 and Make Her Say by Kid Cudi and Kanye West.

It would be fair to say that while he is awed to be in such company, he tries to remain nonchalant.

“It’s certainly a confidence booster,” he says.
Continue reading…

A film with actress Lisa Ray came out on DVD this week (trailer below). Kill Kill Faster Faster was winner of the London Independent Film Festival Best International Feature Film 2008.

Based on the crime novel of the same name by Joel Rose, it also stars Gil Bellows (Shawshank RedemptionMcBeal) and was made by British director Gareth Maxwell Roberts.
Continue reading…

The much-anticipated film Mad, Sad and Bad releases on 31st July in cinemas across the UK. A gala screening was held in central London this week with lead stars Meera Syal and Nitin Ganatra attending.

The film is a thirty-something comedy about a dysfunctional family and group of friends whose personal lives are continuously messed up by their own selfish needs and neuroses.
Continue reading…

Continue reading…

Fresh from his success at the Brussels Film Festival, Faisal Qureshi’s script: The Screaming Phone, won Best Short Script at this year’s Super Shorts Film Festival in London. It is a horror story about a young
woman who’s tormented by the phone ringing in the apartment next door. What is her neighbour hiding and how far will she go to find out?

Faisal is a North West based filmmaker who has directed several short films and is currently getting his first feature off the ground. He won Best Film Story at the Brussels Film Festival for The Footsoldier.

Actor and rapper Riz Ahmed has released another single – ‘Sour Times’. It is the MC’s second independent track after his highly political debut ‘Post 9/11 blues’.

Sour Times follows a similar political theme and features a montage of people mouthing the lyrics. It include rappers Plan B, Scroobius Pip, actors Jim Sturgess, Tom Hardy, and musician Nitin Sawhney.
Continue reading…

A British made Bengali ‘western’ is about to finish its tour of cinemas this week after a successful run.

The Last Thakur is made by director and cinematographer Sadik Ahmed and was first screened at the London Film Festival and Dubai International Film Festival last year.
Continue reading…

Singer and actress Karen David released her debut single Magic Carpet Ride this week with an accompanying video.
Continue reading…

The 2009 Satyajit Ray Short Film Competition was won by Nikesh Shukla (Yam Boy) and Laura Taflinger for their film The Great Identity Swindle, it was announced last week.

“It fuses perfectly the mediums of poetry, cinema, comic books and music resulting in a hilarious study of Asian culture in contemporary Britain. I feel I learnt more about this protagonist’s life in sixty seconds than I do at the end of most Hollywood blockbusters,” said one of the judges.

The one-minute short is part of moti roti’s 60 x 60 project, where established and emerging artists from the South Asian Diaspora – twenty each from Britain, India and Pakistan – present their personal perspective on what ‘home and boundaries’ mean to them.

A Bangladeshi born filmmaker and science teacher has taken to online videos to promote science, while taking a subtle pot-shot at ‘mystics’ who use tricks to con people out of money.

Alom Shaha has made a half-hour film titled ‘Why Science is Important’, thanks to funding from various sources, which aims to tell youngsters why they should bother with science.
Continue reading…

by Jaspreet Pandohar
Freelance journalist

He’s played a rude boy nemesis to Sacha Baron Cohen in Ali G Inda House, a post apocalyptic survivor in 28 Days Later, a homeless heroin addict in The Feral Generation and even a cocky MC in Eastenders. However, Ray Panthaki’s latest screen role sees him in an altogether more sensitive guise.

In City Rats, the British born actor portrays a frustrated young artist obsessed with making a disabled prostitute his muse. A far cry from the recent slate of Gangster obsessed flicks churned out by the British film industry, the dark comedy weaves together a collection of urban tales featuring eight troubled Londoners struggling for recognition and approval amongst a diverse society.
Continue reading…

The International Buddhist Film Festival comes to London in May, offering films from across the world with a Buddhist touch – from documentaries to Hollywood blockbusters.
Continue reading…

Riz Ahmed, the acclaimed actor from the Channel 4 drama Britz, hits cinemas in April with the independently made feature film Shifty.

Described as “sharply scripted, witty, urban thriller”, it is set on the outskirts of London and follows the life of a young drug dealer, the charismatic Shifty, played by Riz.
Continue reading…