Incomparable Shachin Dev Burman: HQ Chowdhury’s labour of love, about the man and his music It is not often that one gets to hear about a book and its author first, and gets to spend some enriching time with the author afterwards, before getting an autographed copy of his book, as a gift. And to think this happened 2,500 km away from my city of Mumbai, in the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka, at Chowdhury’s posh guest house, seems almost unreal. Reading Incomparable Sachin Dev Burman ...

MIFF 2020, Open Forum 2: “Viewers are willing to pay for docu content” Documentaries rarely provide investment returns, let alone earning profits. But that is about to change, or has it changed already? This was discussed on Day 2 of the Open Forum, organised by the Indian Documentary Producers’ Association (IDPA), under the topic, ‘Generating Avenues and Creating Revenues.’ Moderated by Ravi Iyer (Executive Committee Member, IDPA), the panel consisted of Manika ...

Manto, Review: Man to man, rediscovering the Urdu writer, who died a pauper, at 42 Before the film, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) displayed categorises the language of the film as Hindi/Urdu. Saadat Hasan Manto wrote short stories and films in Urdu and there is some Hindi in the film, mainly spoken by others. Among the most controversial of Urdu writers, Manto has been the subject of rediscovery over the last decade or so for reasons unknown. Whatever the reasons, Nandita Das...

Me, Review: Compulsive Disorder With names like Adil Amaan and Preeti Ganguly associated with it, Me could have been worth a watch. The former, who plays a central character, is an acting graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) from a mid-70s batch and an acting teacher for years. Currently, he’s the Head of the Department of Acting at the state run, prestigious, FTII. Preeti Ganguly, who is credited as co-writer, was Ashok Kumar’s daughter and an actor in he...

In many ways, Dilip Kumar is an enigma, even if part of the enigma is designer stuff. Very little is known about his early life, and he quit films in 1998, so even less is known about the last 17 years of his life. It is in this scenario that we see the publication of his long-awaited autobiography, written with the help of chronicler Udayatara Nayar, among the senior-most film journalists and editors in Mumbai and the daughter of a the well-known S.S. Pillai, who edited Screen (she was to suc...