Pro Tools
FILMFESTIVALS | 24/7 world wide coverage
Welcome !
Enjoy the best of both worlds: Film & Festival News, exploring the best of the film festivals community.
Launched in 1995, relentlessly connecting films to festivals, documenting and promoting festivals worldwide.
Working on an upgrade soon.
For collaboration, editorial contributions, or publicity, please send us an email here.
|
CommunicAsia 2016: SpeedCast provides services for SES Asia Pacific satellites, acquires WINS
SpeedCast International Limited, a leading global satellite communications and network service provider, and SES, a leading global satellite operator, have signed a multi-year service agreement for Telemetry, Tracking and Command (‘TT&C’) and Carrier Spectrum Monitoring (‘CSM’) services for four of its satellites in the AsiaPac/IOR region.
Under the service agreement, Spe...
CommunicAsia 2016: CDNetworks sees huge cloud acceleration and security potential in Asia-Pacific
With rampant growth of e-Commerce in countries such as China, India, Japan and South Korea, the Asia-Pacific region is set to become the leading region for e-Commerce globally. By 2018, this region is expected to generate sales of US$1,892 billion regionally and US$3,015 globally. Countries such as Malaysia and Philippines are witnessing the strongest growth, while China and Korea will command th...
CommunicAsia 2016: RGB, regular at the Expo, bags RED Digital Camera distributorship
Characterised by its signature coloured logo, India’s seven year-old RGB Broadcasting was present at CommunicAsia 2016, an occasion it makes a point not to miss. RGB Broadcasting is one of the leading broadcasting solution providers that has served some of the best broadcasters and media brands around the world, such as Star Sports India, Mathrubhumi News, Janam TV, Al Ain Sport Clubs and the Abu Dhabi ...
CommunicAsia 2016: TV5MONDE retains Brightcove for regional OTT services
Brightcove Inc., the leading provider of cloud services for video, announced that TV5MONDE, a global television network and leading broadcaster of French language programming, has selected Brightcove Video Cloud to power its regional Over-The-Top video service, TV5MONDE+ Asie and TV5MONDE+ Pacifique.
Brightcove Video Cloud is a leading online video platform that will be used by TV5MONDE to manage and scale its premium O...
Ben Hur, Review: Chariots for hire
What do you remember about the 1959 screen version of the 1880 story? Nothing, unless you are a Senior Citizen, even if the Indian release was probably two years later than the Hollywood opening. I remember the chariot race, with Charlton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur and Stephen Boyd as Messala. Edge of the seat stuff, especially Messala. The sub-text of Christ, Christianity, Judaism, and the Roman Empire’s sadistic tyranny, was lost on the bunch of school-...
Subhash Ghai, director-showman, launches Trailer of college movie, Days of Tafree
Tafree is an interesting title, being a shortened form of the word tafreeh, which means entertainment or fun in Urdu. The Hindi equivalent is manoranjan. Ahmedabad-based writer-director Krishnadev Yagnik’s debut film Chhello Divas (Last Day, in Gujarati, a college romp) was a hit, and he has written and directed the college romp in Hindi, titled Tafree, with at least two lead actors carried over....
Singer-model-actress Amika Shail releases Ankhan Sharabi
Amika Shail, the Kolkata girl who has now moved to Mumbai, launched a single titled ‘Ankhan Sharabi’, a party number, in Mumbai, last week. The title means ‘Intoxicating Eyes’, in Punjabi.
Amika’s song has her signature singing style. She said about the song, “This track is very close to my heart, as I have not only sung but also performed on the track. The shooting of the song took place in Goa, whi...
FICCI conference: Digital content economy poised to see exponential growth
Digital content specialists outlined the future of India’s digital economy at a conference, organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, FICCI, in association with the Los Angeles India Film Council (LAIFC), last week, at the Taj Land’s End Hotel, Mumbai.
Fast Track India: Bolstering Growth in the Digital Content Economy, a Knowledge Series forum by the Federation of India...
Budhia Singh—Born to Run, alias Duronto, Review: Marathon gone
Running is good for health. Making films on running and runners is not a bad ploy for a production house to get a run for their money, or money for your run. Milking the genre without substantial innovation might not be such good idea, though, and the box-office run might be as short-lived as, or, in fact, much shorter than, the apparently aborted career of India’s child wonder, Budhia Singh.
Based on a true story, Bu...
The Legend of Michael Mishra, Review: Legender Bender, alias What a Choke!
A joke I read as a teenager went like this: After consulting doctor after doctor for two years, a man was unable to find a cure for his eyes popping out and a growing choking feeling. When it became so bad that he was unable to breathe properly, he thought the end was near, and decided to live it up during his last days on earth. So, he went to a tailor to get a new shirt and suit stitched. The tailor took a tape and s...
Six moms and a common problem: being mothers of school-going children in present-day USA.
Amy (Mila Kunis) is a woman with a seemingly perfect life--a great marriage, a boy and a girl and a dog; a beautiful home. Now for the downside: she's over-worked, underpaid (by a 20 something boss Dale Kipler: Clark Duke), over committed to her family and exhausted to the point that she's about to snap. Moreover, she finds that her husband Mike (David Walton) is having a torrid online affair, an...
Ghostbusters-Answer the Call, Review: Making the ghost of it
Sequel? No. Remake? Well, almost. The term going around is re-boot. Thirty years after the first ghost was busted, we have a new version, where the male protagonists are replaced by females, the female by a male, several of the original cast are invited to do cameos and the original writers/director are given all due credit It’s a joy-ride that is slow to take off, but grows on you, almost like the gargantuan balloon of a ghos...
NYIFF-G5A Film Festival, Closing film, A Far Afternoon: One from the art
There must be something about painting genius and longevity. Not only do their works live for centuries, many of the masters themselves live relatively long lives, and are often active, even in their 90s. While watching A Far Afternoon-A Painted Saga, the 2014 documentary on painter Krishen Khanna, by Sruti Harihara Subramaniam, the closing film at the NYIFF-G5A Film Society Film Festival, one was stunned to find that Kr...
NYIFF-G5A Film Festival Reviews, U Turn: Highway is my way
In many ways, the choice of U Turn as the penultimate screening of the NYIFF-G5A Film Society’s Film Festival, the first ever Mumbai edition of the annual event, held 7,793.27 miles/12,560 km/16 hours flying time away, was a U Turn, compared to the kind of films they had been showing for the four preceding weeks. Symbolically, the idea of the festival is itself a U Turn, since all the films are Indian, sourced from NYIFF. Coal t...
Star Trek Beyond, Review: Nebulous Enterprise
On TV, Star Trek was conceived in 1966, as a weekly NBC series, running for three seasons. Graduation to the big screen was logical. Since 1979, we have had a dozen treks so far, and here comes the 13th Enterprise, marking the golden jubilee year, and spelling the end of star-billed Starship Enterprise, its literal destruction. The film is disruptive in plot, personal in dramatisation and modest in special effects.
Three years after its five-year...
NYIFF-G5A Film Festival Reviews, The Threshold: I’ll take your leave
A good old joke goes like this:
An ideal marriage is one wherein two people become one.
The problems arise when they want to decide which one.
It goes without saying that marriage is no joke, and two people can never really become one. I have seen a couple that was telepathically on the same wave-length and usually spoke the same words in unison, without any previous arrangement to this end, go through a bit...
NYIFF-G5A Film Festival Reviews, Kadambari: Platonic tonic and poetic injustice
Literally, ‘of/from the Kadamba tree’, the word kadambari (kaadambari in Hindi and kaadambori in Bengali) lends itself to many meanings. The most ancient reference to this work is as an intricate romantic novel, in Sanskrit. Several films have been made with this title, including some in Hindi. This one is about a real-life character called Kadambari, who was the sister-in-law of India’s literary...
Great Grand Masti, Review: Grate Bland Cesti
Amar, Meet and Prem.
"Amar, meet Prem!"
Penilty corner, Penil interest, Penilti-mate
Riteish Deshmukh, Vivek Oberoi, Aftab Shivdasani.
Sapna, Rekha, Nisha.
Dream-Line-Night.
Pooja Bose, Mishti, Shraddha Das.
Mother-in-law, Sister-in-law.
Shrew-brew-slew, Three into two won’t do.
Usha Nadkarni, Kangna Sharma.
Antakshari Baba, Babu Rangeela.
Ba ba black sheep, D.K. Prose; Cock-a-doodle-doo, Of all the animals in the zoo.
S...
G5A-NYIFF Film Festival Reviews: Daaravtha (Marathi for Threshold)
Here’s one more winner screened at ongoing the G5A-NYIFF Film Festival: Best Debut Film of a Director at the 63rd National Film Awards in the Non Feature Film category. It’s a 30-minute short fiction, a coming of age and discovering homosexuality parallelism, that pieces together real-life experiences of several gay men into a sensitive collage. If it does not make you sit up and applaud, while impressing you with ...
Reviews, G5A-NYIFF screenings: Agli Baar, Absent, El’ Ayichi
Devashish Makhija is a Kolkata boy who was so shattered by his mother’s death that he got on to a Mumbai-bound train, in an unreserved compartment, and has been living here since. After a stint in advertising and after assisting debutant director Anurag Kashyap on Black Friday, he decided to go solo. Black Friday was about the Mumbai blasts and was stuck with the censors for years.
But for an unreleased Oonga, all his e...
CommunicAsia 2016: Huawei’s Cloud Communication journey, and debut
Founded in 1987, Huawei is a Chinese multi-national, headquartered in Shenzhen. At CommunicAsia 2016, in Singapore, Huawei made its debut in the field of Cloud Communication, an E2E communication solution for Personal, Home, Enterprise, and Vertical use. Cloud Communication helps operators implement network evolution, service innovation, and business model transformation by means of all cloud, full openness, and redefined ...
Lightware opens China Operations Center
Lightware Visual Engineering Limited, the Budapest, Hungary based manufacturer of professional digital video and audio signal management solutions for DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, 3G-SDI, HDBaseT, fiber, caters to the needs of the Corporate, Hospitality, Medical, Military, Education, and Live Events markets. The inventor of digital matrix switching, Lightware entered China to provide world-class video switching for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games openin...
CommunicAsia 2016: Accelerate Digitisation--Building a Better Connected World
By Alan Marcus, Head, ICT Agenda
In this article, Alan Marcus, Head of ICT Agenda, Member of Management Committee, World Economic Forum, and Speaker, Asia ICT Innovation Forum 2016, at CommunicAsia, shares his thoughts on some of these changing dynamics, as well as rule-making opportunities in the digital world.
Rapid advancements in digital technology are redefining society. The plummeting cost of advanced ...
Reviews, G5A-NYIFF screenings: Velutha Rathrikal (White Nights)
Inclement weather (read incessant rains) and no means of transport deprived me of the opportunity to catch-up on For the Love of a Man, screened on 28th June, as part of the G5A-NYIFF film festival, currently underway at the Foundation’s Black Box, located in a creatively designed facility in an erstwhile industrial estate, close to the iconic Famous Mahalaxmi studio and office complex. Earlier in the year, I had seen only ...
The Legend of Tarzan, Review: Gorillas in the Midst
Remember the immortal lines, “Me Tarzan, you Jane”? Now try this, "He's Tarzan, you're Jane. He'll come for you," says her captor to Jane. He sure will. He’s been coming on to the screen for the last 98 years, in 41 movie and 57 TV outings. Adds up to 98 again. The Legend of Tarzan, preceding the character’s on-screen centenary by a whisker, is a slightly over-written exercise, without too ...
|
About Siraj Syed
 Syed Siraj
(Siraj Associates)
Siraj Syed is a film-critic since 1970 and a Former President of the Freelance Film Journalists' Combine of India.
He is the India Correspondent of FilmFestivals.com and a member of FIPRESCI, the international Federation of Film Critics, Munich, Germany
Siraj Syed has contributed over 1,015 articles on cinema, international film festivals, conventions, exhibitions, etc., most recently, at IFFI (Goa), MIFF (Mumbai), MFF/MAMI (Mumbai) and CommunicAsia (Singapore). He often edits film festival daily bulletins.
He is also an actor and a dubbing artiste. Further, he has been teaching media, acting and dubbing at over 30 institutes in India and Singapore, since 1984.
Bandra West, Mumbai India View my profileSend me a message
|
