Siraj Syed interviews young film-maker Pratik Rajen Kothari
*How many films have you made since your student days and what/who made it possible to make them?
I have made three short films plus co-directed one before Hell O Hello. I also made some music videos. Almost all of these are zero/extremely low budget. At the start, people who are instrumental in making it possible are your like-minded friends. I have a very co-operative core team, without whom, I just wouldn't have had the coura...
FICCI FLO Film Festival, Report, I: FLO Mo
Known for organising India’s biggest three-day Media and Entertainment conclave in March every year, FRAMES, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) held its first film festival in the city of Mumbai, during February 18-20, a fortnight after the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) and six weeks before FRAMES. It was organised by the FICCI Ladies Organisation, FLO. Unfortunately, due to a host of reasons, FICCI F...
MAMI’s MFF Diary, Part II: 7th IFFM, Jan. 6-13, 2005, Mumbai, India
IFFM was into its 7th year when I returned from Singapore for good, and made got the first opportunity to attend the festival. Covering it for the academic publication, Kinema, I wrote:
MAMI, the acronym for the body that organises the International Film Festival of Mumbai (IFFM), stands for Mumbai Academy of Moving Image. That’s a curiously old-fashioned name for a body that was set up only about ei...
Back in the mid 90s, a group of Mumbai-based film-enthusiasts felt that it was time the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) stopped alternating every year between New Delhi and other metro cities like Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Thiruvananthapuram and Mumbai, and settled down in Mumbai for good. Some of the strong factors in favour were:
1. Mumbai is the birth place of Indian cinema and the film capital of India, although films are made aplenty in other cities as well.
2....
