News

Festival

Anurag Kashyap, Sunny Leone, Taapsee Pannu, Rahul Bhat, Ranjan Singh, Anup Singh, Don Palathara, and Sami Khan are among the guest list at the 12th edition of Bmo International Film Festival of South Asia (Iffsa), Toronto (Oct. 12-22).

With a lineup of some 120 films and more than 30 events, Iffsa is among the largest South Asian-themed festivals in the world. Selections include Cannes duo – Kashyap’s “Kennedy,” starring Leone and Bhat, and Kanu Behl’s “Agra,” Laetitia Colombani’s “The Braid” starring Kim Raver (“Grey’s Anatomy”) and Berlin selections “Ghaath” by Chhatrapal Ninawe and “Aatmapamphlet” by Ashish Bende. From Rotterdam, Palathara’s “Family,” starring Vinay Forrt and Devashish Makhija’s “Joram,” headlined by Manoj Bajpayee, feature alongside Jagath Manuwarna’s Sri Lankan film “Whispering Mountains.”

Acclaimed Bangladesh series “Pett Kata Shaw” will feature as will Canadian Bengali-language production “Meghna Konnya” by Fuad Chowdhury, Atul Sabharwal’s Hindi-language “Berlin” and Osman...

“Pov,” the longest-running series for independent documentaries on television, has unveiled the majority of its slate for the series’ 35th season, which launches on July 11 with Yung Chang’s “Wuhan Wuhan.”

Neighborhood gentrification on Chicago’s south side, land defenders in the Philippines and the 2018 Zimbabwean general election are among the many topics that will be examined by the 14 feature docus in the upcoming season, which will run through Jan. 16.

PBS has revealed 13 of the upcoming season’s “Pov” films beyond “Wuhan Wuhan,” an observational documentary about the first wave of the Covid-19 lockdown, with one more entry slated to be unveiled in June.

While celebrity driven docs are all the rage with streaming services, “Pov” will stay true to its roots and program social issues films that delve into topics including environmental justice immigration and systemic inequity.

“PBS is proud that after 35 years, “Pov” continues to deliver artistically unique,...

Rodrigo Reyes’s 499 (Mexico/USA) wins Special Jury Prize – International Feature Documentary.

Elizabeth Lo’s Stray about stray dogs roaming the streets of Turkey has won Best International Feature Documentary Award at the Hot Docs as top brass announced C$42,000 in cash prizes on Thursday (May 14).

Festival organisers selected winners from this year’s official competition at the postponed festival and additionally honoured Canadian filmmakers. More than 140 official festival selections and most of the winners will be made available to Ontario audiences online from May 28 on Hot Docs at Home Tvod here.

Special Jury Prize – International Feature Documentary honours went...

Rodrigo Reyes’s 499 (Mexico/USA) wins Special Jury Prize – International Feature Documentary.

Elizabeth Lo’s Stray about stray dogs roaming the streets of Turkey has won Best International Feature Documentary Award at the Hot Docs as top brass announced CA $42,000 in cash prizes on Thursday (May 14).

Festival organisers selected winners from this year’s official competition at the postponed festival and additionally honoured Canadian filmmakers. More than 140 official festival selections and most of the winners will be made available to Ontario audiences online from May 28 on Hot Docs at Home Tvod here.

Special Jury Prize – International Feature Documentary honours went...

Oscar nominated short film “St. Louis Superman” will premiere Monday, May 18 at 9 p.m. Et/Pt on MTV, VH1 and MTV2 via simulcast, TheWrap has exclusively learned. Watch the trailer embed above.

The critically-acclaimed film is co-directed by Smriti Mundhra and Sami Khan and produced by Al Jazeera Witness and Poh Si Teng. “St. Louis Superman” is the first acquisition for Sheila Nevins for MTV Documentary Films and is being positioned for Emmy consideration. The network enlisted Nevins, a longtime HBO producer and executive, to lead its new documentary films division last May.

Music provides a different kind of counterpoint in Sami Khan and Smriti Mundhra’s “St. Louis Superman,” about a battle rapper and Ferguson protester who embarks on a successful political career and becomes a Missouri State Representative. Fighting to change an imbalanced and fundamentally racist system from the inside, using his battle-rap skillset to drum up positive change,...

As has been the case for the last few years, the 2020 Oscar nominees in the Best Documentary Short category are a remarkable bunch, and TheWrap gathered the filmmakers behind them to speak on Tuesday about the work that went into exploring such tough subjects.

Possibly the most sensitive topic touched on in this year’s field was that of Resignation Syndrome, a fairly new psychological case that has seen hundreds of traumatized refugee children become so mentally unwell that they fall into a comatose state for months or even years. In “Life Overtakes Me,” director-producers Kristine Samuelson and John Haptas managed to earn the trust of three refugee families with children in such a state and explored how they handle such a difficult situation while fighting to retain their asylum status in Sweden.

Also Read: How 'Joker' Composer Hildur Guðnadóttir Used 'Macho Chords' to Get Inside the Character's Head

Samuelson...

Non-fiction storytelling is well-represented in this year’s Oscar race. Five movies are vying for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar, but many of the contenders for Best Documentary (Short Subject) are almost feature-length experiences as well. The Academy’s rules allow shorts to run up to 40 minutes; two of this year’s nominees run exactly that length, while the others are close to half an hour. By contrast, the longest animated short nominee is just under 15 minutes, while the longest live action short is 25 minutes. That’s understandable: The documentary form often demands more time to establish context, and this year’s nominees illustrate that challenge.

As usual for the category, all of the contenders deal with timely (and often troubling) subject matter through personal dramas from around the world. It’s a particularly strong collection of non-fiction filmmaking as well. Each nominee works around the traditional talking-head approach with vivid,...

The Oscar-nominated documentary shorts are not now, nor have they ever been, a laughing matter. But the joke that gets told most often, which has a nugget of truth in it, is that they frequently represent the grimmest category of any given year at the Academy Awards.

Recent nominees have vividly, heartbreakingly illustrated end-of-life care, the opioid crisis, the plight of refugees, systemic racism in the criminal justice system, and the Holocaust. These are not, generally speaking, films that you can idly eat popcorn to.

This year’s nominees, which occupy their own theatrical program this week via ShortsTV, also tackle heavy subjects and will also make any halfway-present audience member ponder important issues of the day. And yet, somehow, they’re a little less brain-meltingly sad than usual.

Also Read: Oscar Short Nominees Discuss Creating Fiction From Bits of Reality

Which says a little more about the nominations from...

These five Oscar-nominated documentary short films have made it to the summit of the nonfiction craft. Topics are international in scope: immigration, refugees, the personal cost of political activism, government malfeasance and girls in war-torn

Kabul skateboarding for kicks.

In the Absence

More than 300 people died when the Mv Sewol ferry sank off the coast of South Korea in 2014; most tragically, 250 were high school students who remained in their cabins per instructions, rather than attempting to escape. The accident (some of which was televised live) traumatized South Korea, says “In the Absence” producer Gary Byung-Seok Kam. It is the fourth project for Kam and director Yi Seung-Jun. The documentary combines real-time footage of the accident recorded by rescuers, the students’ own cellphone videos, news footage and later-day interviews with parents and civilian divers. “We invite [the] audience to feel something behind the footage: the absence of the country on that day to protect us,...

Just like the film’s subject, “St. Louis Superman” is looking to beat back the doubters and take home this year’s Oscar for Best Documentary Short. It’s not that far of a stretch to see it winning as its currently in second place in our combined odds with a 4/1 chance of prevailing.

The short, helmed by Smriti Mundhra and Sami Khan, focuses on Bruce Franks, Jr., a battle rapper and community activist who was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives in 2016. Franks was exposed to gun violence at an early age when he witnessed his older brother getting shot to death while being used as a human shield. After the 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson, Franks became more involved as an activist. The documentary shows Franks’s efforts to get youth violence officially designated by the legislature as a public health epidemic.

SEE2020 Oscar...

Exclusive: Canadian outfit Marina Cordoni Entertainment is taking the title to the Efm.

Toronto’s Marina Cordoni Entertainment is in Berlin with the world market premiere of the Butler Brothers’ heist comedy First Round Down.

The feature centres on the misadventures of a former ice hockey prodigy. Dylan Bruce plays the lead as a former athlete and hitman on the straight and narrow who returns home to care for his younger brother and finds his chequered past catching up with him. Rachel Wilson and Rob Ramsay also star.

Substance Productions produced First Round Down in association with Marina Cordoni Entertainment, Telefilm Canada and Unobstructed View.

Cordoni has just licensed worldwide rights excluding Canada on Gail Harvey’s upcoming thriller Never Saw It Coming to Jay Firestone’s Prodigy Pictures. Katie Boland stars in the film, which is set to begin shooting on March 23.

The Efm sales slate includes Connor Gaston’s drama The Devout, Adam Garnet Jones’s Toronto...

Sami Khan's birth-search dram Khoya is opening here in Toronto, tomorrow night, at The Carlton. We have your exclusive first look at a new teaser timed with the release. You will find that below. Khan and his lead Rupak Ginn will be at The Carlton tomorrow night for the evening screenings and participating in Q&As. Roger Moreau (Rupak Ginn) - the hero of Sami Khan’s Khoya - is indifferent to India’s tourist attractions. The young Toronto-raised, Indian-born man is on a quest to solve the mystery of his birth. That quest takes him to some of the country’s rougher patches, where Roger follows in the footsteps of the poor, the desperate and the borderline criminal, gradually unraveling the tangled circumstances of how...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Being a film writer has its ups and downs. We are constantly inundated by wannabe filmmakers looking to make their mark on the world. Like any other aspirational pursuit, the vast majority of the output from these cold calls is - to put it nicely - awful. However, once in a while something appears out of the blue that is good, and that makes all of the wading through garbage worth it. Today's example of a film that took me totally by surprise is Sami Khan's Khoya, a drama about an Indian man searching for his birth parents in an India that is completely foreign to him. Khoya was sent to me by Khan in connection with its screening that the New York Indian Film...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

The New York Indian Film Festival (Nyiff) announced the full lineup last night for their 16th year of celebrating independent, art house, alternate, and diaspora films from/about/connected to the Indian subcontinent (May 7 – May 14). Dedicated to bringing these films to a New York audience, the festival will feature 40 screenings (35 narrative, 5 documentary) –all seen for the first time in New York City. In addition, the festival will also feature five programs of short films.

The festival highlights various cinemas of India’s different regions. All the films are subtitled in English and some of the languages this year include Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Telegu, Assamese, Haryanavi and Urdu. This year’s festival will feature a couple of sidebars –Nfdc restored first films of filmmakers and a three-generations sidebar, films of Bimal Roy, Basu Bhattacharya and Aditya Bhattacharya.

The festival’s film lineup includes 2016 National Award winners A Far Afternoon,...

The Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles has announced the juries and additional programming for the upcoming 14th edition, which runs April 6-10 in Hollywood.

Three films have been added to the line-up on April 10, including Lena Khan’s feature debut The Tiger Hunter, and a community screening of Sami Khan’s Khoya.

A restored version of Sujata, provided by the National Film Archive Of India, will screen as a tribute to director Bimal Roy on the 50th anniversary of his death.

The jury for the 2016 Narrative Film Competition includes:

· Shonali Bose, film-maker (Margarita, With A Straw & Amu);

· Shalini Dore, Variety; and

· Alesia Weston, international consultant to independent film-makers and film festivals.

The jury for the 2016 Short Film Competition includes:

· Rizwan Manji, actor (Jim Jarmusch’s upcoming Paterson);

· Aldo Velasco, director and editor (Chittagong); and

· Laura Nix, documentary film-maker (The Yes Men Are Revolting).

As previously announced, the festival will open with Angry Indian Goddesses (pictured) and the...

Here's your daily dose of an indie film in progress; at the end of the week, you'll have the chance to vote for your favorite. In the meantime: Is this a movie you’d want to see? Tell us in the comments. "Khoya" Tweetable Logline: After the death of his adopted mother, a man travels from Canada to rural India desperately searching for his birth family. Elevator Pitch: When Roger Moreau's adopted mother dies unexpectedly he loses the last tie he has to his Canadian upbringing. He travels to India to search for the birth family that gave him up for adoption 30 years ago. His journey takes him into the dark alleys, dusty roads and cramped train cars of India's underclass as he tries to connect the threads of his story. Ultimately, he is pushed to his breaking point and forced to confront the ghosts that have been haunting...

Just after midnight here in NYC and I have our three winners for the Kore-eda retrospective taking place at the BAMcinématek, starting today, August 21st - September 1st.

So congratulations to Zoey Smith, Sami Khan and Michael Carroll! They’ll each be getting a pair of tickets to a screening of their choice. And for any other locals, Bam’s site of the retrospective is listed below, so check it out, a great lineup. Tickets should still be available for Friday and Saturday’s screenings of Still Walking and Nobody Knows with Kore-eda in attendance.

Adnan Sami's father Arshad Sami Khan's last wish was to be buried near his home in Islamabad. His funeral is to be held in the afternoon on Friday June 26. Pakistan's president Asif Ali Zardari and the Prime Minister Syed Yosaf Raza Gilani are expected to attend Arshad Sami's state funeral in Islamabad. "He will be getting a full state funeral with a 21-gun salute send-off. And yes the Prime Minister and Prez are coming. My mom, son and brother are flying to Karachi from Mumbai on Thursday and from there we take a connecting flight to Islamabad where the burial will take place on Friday after the Jumma prayers," said the heartbroken singer. "You know he died on my brother's birthday. We did our best for him. My only regret is that we could spend only fifteen minutes of his last moments when we could've been with him...

Adnan Sami's father Arshad Sami Khan's last wish was to be buried near his home in Islamabad. His funeral is to be held in the afternoon on Friday June 26. Pakistan's president Asif Ali Zardari and the Prime Minister Syed Yosaf Raza Gilani are expected to attend Arshad Sami's state funeral in Islamabad. "He will be getting a full state funeral with a 21-gun salute send-off. And yes the Prime Minister and Prez are coming. My mom, son and brother are flying to Karachi from Mumbai on Thursday and from there we take a connecting flight to Islamabad where the burial will take place on Friday after the Jumma prayers," said the heartbroken singer. "You know he died on my brother's birthday. We did our best for him. My only regret is that we could spend only fifteen minutes of his last moments when we could've been with him...

By Subhash K Jha

Adnan Sami’s father Arshad Sami Khan’s last wish was to be buried near his home in Islamabad. His funeral is to be held in the afternoon on Friday June 26.

Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari and the prime minister Syed Yosaf Raza Gilani are expected to attend Arshad Sami’s state funeral in Islamad.

“He will be getting a full state funeral with a 21-gun salute send-off. And yes the prime minister and prez are coming. My mom, son and brother are flying into Karachi from Mumbai on .

Famous singer Adnan Sami’s father Arshad Sami Khan passed away today on Monday June 22nd afternoon at the Kokilaben-Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital at Andheri, Mumbai. Arshad Sami Khan had been suffering from cancer and was brought to Mumbai by Adnan for better medical treatment. Since last few weeks he had been admitted at the Kokilaben-Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital.

Arshad Sami Khan, a Pakistani national was born in Pakistan and was well trained in composing classical and jazz music. One can recall recently made allegations by Adnan’s estranged wife on him which.

Mumbai, Visits by superstars Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan and then calls from Rajesh Khanna and Saira Bano to inquire about his ailing father have completely overwhelmed Pakistani singer Adnan Sami. Adnan's father Arshad Sami Khan, a former Pakistani diplomat, has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and is admitted to the Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital. But Adnan says he couldn't meet either the Big B or King Khan. "I missed both Bachchan-saab and Shah Rukh by minutes. But at least my mother was there when Shah Rukh so graciously visited with his daughter (Suhana). My father couldn't recall the names of all the Bachchan and Srk films he had seen except 'Veer-Zaara'," Adnan said. The singer says his father was happy when Shah Rukh called ...

The Big B's visit to Adnan Sami's ailing father at the Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani hospital on Thursday evening has triggered off the industry's A-Listers' conscience. On Friday, barely 24 hours after the Big B, Adnan's father Arshad Sami Khan was surprised to see another superstar-guest walk in. It was Shah Rukh Khan whom Adnan's father has almost adopted as a distant son in his heart. Explains Adnan, "Shah Rukh resembles Dilip Kumar Saab so much. And Dilip Saab whom we call Yusuf Lala is not just a favourite of our family but also a relative. So to us Shah Rukh is a direct descendent of Yusuf Lala's heritage." The frail ailing Arshad Sami could barely speak but uttered two words, "Veer Zara". This was the former Pakistani diplomat's way of recalling the Srk film that did its substantial bit to improve relations between the two countries. Says Adnan emotionally, "I...

The Big B's visit to Adnan Sami's ailing father at the Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani hospital on Thursday evening has triggered off the industry's A-Listers' conscience. On Friday, barely 24 hours after the Big B, Adnan's father Arshad Sami Khan was surprised to see another superstar-guest walk in. It was Shah Rukh Khan whom Adnan's father has almost adopted as a distant son in his heart. Explains Adnan, "Shah Rukh resembles Dilip Kumar Saab so much. And Dilip Saab whom we call Yusuf Lala is not just a favourite of our family but also a relative. So to us Shah Rukh is a direct descendent of Yusuf Lala's heritage." The frail ailing Arshad Sami could barely speak but uttered two words, "Veer Zara". This was the former Pakistani diplomat's way of recalling the Srk film that did its substantial bit to improve relations between the two countries. Says Adnan emotionally, "I...