Sponsored by The Indian Institute of Performing Arts (IIPA)

Director: Umakanth Thumrugoti
Music: Anu Malik
Songs sung by: Kailash Kher, Sunidhi Chauhan
Cast:  Teja, Kunal Sharma, Shiva Varma, Rajeshwari Sachdev-Badola, Ayesha Jaleel, Vivek Mushran

East Coast Premiere

The director will be present at the screening

Set in middle-class India, 7 Days in Slow Motion marks the comical yet thoughtful journey of a 6th grader Ravi and his friends whose lives change when they chance upon a camera of a visiting American tourist. Their insatiable love for movies push them into a film-making mission of their own, but, their path is riddled with problems: they only have 7 days to make the film as their final school exams begin in 7 days.
Ravi uses creative ways to keep his friends involved in the project during the stressful exam season. But his movie-making project accidentally captures some darker moments of his friends' and families' lives which get revealed in a party where everyone suddenly sees on the screen who they are and what they represent.
7 Days in Slow Motion, in a subtle way, shows a kid's rebellion against a system where there is a lot of pressure to succeed academically. It is a beautifully pictured comedy of errors about a filmmaking project by children, where adults see the truth through a child's eyes and his 'borrowed' camera.


A 15 year veteran of Disney Feature Animation, Umakanth Thumrugoti, visualizes his stories in art palettes and story panels. He began his career at Disney training on Lion King and proceeding to earn credits as a CG artist on Pocahontas, Fantasia 2000, Treasure Planet, Chicken Little etc. In his 15 year stint at Disney, he worked in development as well as production in varying roles including Software Developer, Technical Director, Digital Effects Supervisor, Sequence Lead and Lighting Supervisor.

He also spent four years in Visual Development (Kingdom of the Sun, Wildlife, Chairy, Joe Jump etc.) at Disney, designing layouts, character looks etc. Most recently, he was Co-Art-Director on a project in development for Disney Feature Animation.

He took a one year sabbatical to shoot his first live-action feature film in India. After screen testing over 300 kids in Hyderabad, he chose his 3 main leads and rehearsed with them extensively.

Director: Raja Menon
Cast:  Naseeruddin Shah, Vijay Raaz, Arjun Mathur, Tannishtha Chatterjee

US Premiere

The director will be present at the screening

Barah Aana is produced by an interesting team of people: an Italian (Giulia Achilli), an American (Raj Yerasi) and an Indian (Raja Menon).                                                                                                     

Barah Aana is about the faceless masses of India. The story is an in-your-face tragi-comedy through the eyes of three migrant workers in Mumbai, Shukla the driver (Naseeruddin Shah), Aman the waiter (Arjun Mathur), and Yadav the night-guard (Vijay Raaz). Barah Anna scores big, not because it is a story of the under-privileged fatigued to the bone but with dreams in their eye. There have been many movies with that theme. It is acclaimed as an honest attempt to portray their point of view. The characters are migrants in the fabled city of Mumbai, a cacophony of color and sound, used as the other character in this movie by Raja Menon.                                                                         

The three are far from their loved ones; they live in the slum, spend their evenings drinking and talking about their lives. When Yadav needs money for his son dying of typhoid and his pleading to the apartment owners only brings ridicule, the three become accidental criminals. And sadly, their attempt to snatch back their self-esteem robbed by their masters, does not pay.



"Barah Aana was conceived during a period when India was changing. With globalization driving economic growth and raising standards of living, especially among the upper and middle classes, a culture of conspicuous consumption was taking hold.

I found myself wondering, how does the common man feel witnessing the lifestyles of today's newly rich?  In a more materialistic age, where money seems to have become the barometer of happiness, how far will he go for money?  Whether it's desperate circumstances or a desire for something more, might he be driven from a state of happy acceptance into taking matters into his own hands? And if he does take matters into his own hands, what would it do to his own preconceived and previously unquestioned notions of who he is?

In Barah Aana I try to explore these questions through the eyes of a driver, a watchman, and a waiter.  The film is from their point of view and like any point of view, this view is sometimes self-gratifying, self-pitying, one-sided, brutally honest, and everything in between. While the film is shot from their perspective, we don't intrude on their lives and the camera acts as a voyeur while watching their lives unfold" -- Raja Menon.

Director: Adoor Gopalakrishnan
Cast: Sukumari, Nedumudi Venu, Praveena Lalithabai, Ravi Vallathol, Seema Nair

US Premiere 

The director will be present at the screening

In this four-part collection of modern-day stories, director Adoor Gopalakrishnan presents situations in which protagonists face human predicaments. In 'The Thief', a schoolboy rebuffs slurs on his father being a thief and a jailbird. But the boy is crushed when his desperate belief that his father will reform is proved wrong. 'The Police' is a story of a couple of corrupt policemen who frame a poor unskilled worker to cover their own tracks. In 'Two Men and a Woman', a student under the patronage of a rich family, thinks he has made a servant girl pregnant which initially unleashes his shame - and subsequent strength. Finally, 'One Woman, Two Men' sees two rivals, vying for the affection of a beautiful woman, who pay a heavy price to win her commitment while she remains enigmatic in her choices.



Adoor Gopalakrishnan, a master film maker from Kerala, India, is one of the pioneers of the Indian Parallel Cinema movement. After graduating  from the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune in 1965, he founded the Chitralekha Film Society along with other graduates of the FTII.

Adoor has scripted and directed eleven feature films and about thirty Short films and documentaries. His films portray reality in its primal and uncorrupted form.

All his films have won national and international awards. Notably, one his early works, Elippathayam (The Rat Trap) won him the British Film Institute Award for 'the most original and imaginative film' of 1982. He has also won the International Films Critics Prize (FIPRESCI) six times successively. The Government of India has conferred on him the Padma Shree in 1984 and also India's second highest civilian honor, 'The Padma Vibhushan' for his contribution to Arts. The French Government has bestowed on him the 'Legion of Honor' in 2005. In 2006 he received India's 'Dada Saheb Phalke Award' for Life Time Achievement in Films.

Adoor recently won the Indian National Award as the Best Director for his film "Four Women".

Director: Prasanna Vithanage
Cast: Joe Abeywickrama, Priyanka Samaraweera, Linton Semage

US Premiere 

The director will be present at the screening    

Considered to be a modern day classic of Sinhalese Cinema, the film deals with the brutal war between the Sri Lankan state and the Tamils living in the North of the Island. On the day of a full moon, Vannihamy (Joe Abeywickrama), is presented by the army with the remains of his son. Facing pressure from his neighbors to accept the compensation offered by the army, the elderly blind man retains a clarity of vision that reaches far beyond what the eye can see. Refusing to sign the compensation papers he insists that his son is still alive. Influenced by Satyajit Ray, this impassioned and impartial neo-realist film uses a spare style and little music, focusing instead on the excellent performances and the pathos and understanding emanating from Vithanage's script.                                                              

The Sinhalese government and military, fearing the film would hamper the army's recruitment of rural youth and focus public attention on social and political problems in Sri Lanka, suspended its screening indefinitely. Vithanage appealed to the courts. The Sri Lanka Supreme Court eventually directed the government to lift the ban and awarded the director compensation and damages.

Prasanna Vithanage's opus of five previous films has made him one of Sri Lanka 's leading filmmakers with a worldwide critical and popular reputation. He began his career in the 1980's as a theatre director. He translated into Sinhala and directed Bernard Shaw's "Arms and the Man" in 1986 and Dario Fo's "Raspberries and Trumpets" in 1991, before setting out as a filmmaker in 1992. Despite his busy schedules, Vithanage also devotes some serious time and effort to the education and training of young people in the art and business of filmmaking. He returned to his theatrical roots in 2006 when he wrote, directed and produced two hugely popular Sinhala one act plays "Horu Samaga Heluwen" which ran to nearly 150 performances islandwide.These were based on his own translation of two short plays of Dario Fo ('The Virtuous Burglar" and "One Wore a Suit and One Wore Tails"). Vithanage also produced Uberto Pasolini's "Machan", the international co-production, which debuted at the Venice International Film Festival in Summer 2008.

Sponsored by Sukh Sagar Cuisine of Piscataway

Director: Sarba Das

What happens when a bunch of hapless Hindus from Hoboken get mixed up with an underworld don with connections to an Indian call center? And what happens when a good Jersey girl falls for a smooth operator thousands of miles away? For one thing, the phone keeps ringing.

Meet the Raj family: deep in denial about its creeping credit card debt, dodging collection notices and phone calls. When eldest daughter Sonal finally picks up the phone, she meets a call center operator like no other, Rob Roy. Little does she know that he's oceans away. Her brother Shyam, a college drop out, is too busy dreaming of becoming the next Dr. Dre (peddling his hip-hop album Hapa Means Weed in Japanese) to notice the bills piling up. But romance is in the air for him too, in the form of Radha, a village girl from India, arriving in America to marry a Dollar Store mogul.     

As for the youngest daughter Jamuna, well, she just wants a Bat Mitzvah. And another bag of Doritos.

Add to this mix Mausi, a chai-fueled Mary Poppins fresh from India, hell bent on getting this meat-eating, energy-wasting, spendthrift family in line. Little does she know that the Gods have it all figured out.

Narrated by award-winning actor Tony Sirico (aka "Paulie Walnuts" of The Sopranos), Karma Calling is a snapshot of our hyper-globalized world through the eyes of a Garden state family just trying to get by. It's a quintessential American tale about unlikely alliances, outsourcing, and outwitting.

And at its heart, it is the story of a family learning to live together.

When karma calls, you can't hang up.

Sponsored by Mrittika of New Jersey

Director: Suman Mukhopadhyay
Cast: Rituparna Sengupta, Dhritiman Chatterji, Joy Sengupta, Subrata Dutta, Kabir Suman

Based on Rabindranath Tagore's 1916 novella, Chaturanga concerns Sachish, a young, upper caste Bengali who rebels against his conservative father and joins his reformist uncle in helping the lower caste. Sachish further scandalizes the family by offering to marry the pregnant mistress of his cavalier brother. Two unexpected tragedies - the young mother's suicide and the beloved uncle's death - turn Sachish increasingly toward the world he has criticized. He joins a religious cult and follows a path of Hindu asceticism, but all this leads to disillusionment, fueled by unfulfilled desire and dysfunctional relationships with his best friend and a young widow. As in his first film, Herbert, Mukhopadhyay proves himself an idiosyncratic filmmaker concerned with the interiors of places and people. Tagore's novella has elsewhere been translated as "Quartet," which captures the "foursomes" connoted by the original title: the four main characters and their interlocking relationships; the four elements of the classical Indian army; and the four-player version of chess. Mukhopadhyay uses an English title of comparable subtlety, referring to the four parts of the novella itself, a story of love both played as a game and fought as a war of ideas and caste struggle. The film interrogates our perception of human evolution and proposes an unending journey, a timeless quest.

Based on a short story by well-known feminist writer Vaidehi Director: Girish Kasaravalli Cast: Umashree, K.G. Krishna Murthy, M.D. Pallavi, Poornima Mohan, Ashok Sandip US Premiere 

It's 1999 in a coastal town near Kundapura, and Gulabi (Umashree), the local midwife, has had a hard life -- she's one of the only Muslims in a primarily Hindu community, and her husband Musa (K.G. Krishna Murthy) has left her to take another wife. Gulabi loves nothing more than a good movie, but, on one occasion, she is forced to leave a picture midway through when she's summoned to help a local woman give birth. Gulabi grudgingly assists with the delivery, and the grateful family presents her a lavish gift -- a color television, the first in the village, and a satellite dish to go with it. Given her religious faith and her marital troubles, Gulabi is something of an outcast in town, but when word gets around about her television, a handful of women from the neighborhood begin stopping by to watch soap operas with her (though some are content to just peek though the windows at her new set). One of Gulabi's new friends is Netru (M.D. Pallavi), who has marital troubles of her own, and the two women bond over their shared pains and love of the daily serials. But with India and Pakistan at war, tensions between Muslims and Hindus reach a new high, and when Netru disappears, many accuse Gulabi of foul play. The lead actress Umashree has recently been awarded the Indian National Award for Best Actress for Gulabi Talkies. The world of Kurosawa, Ray, Ozu, Fellini and Antonioni inspired Girish Kasaravalli and his conviction in neo-realist cinema deepened. His first film as an independent director was Ghatashraddha in 1977, which won him the Golden lotus, and also won a few international awards. He won his second Golden Lotus for Tabarana Kathe in 1987. Considered as one of the best-edited films in India, the film deals with the futile efforts of a retired government servant to earn his pension. In 1997, he came up with, Thaayi Saheba which won him his third Golden Lotus award. Thaayi Saheba is considered to be the most mature work of the director, dealing with the transition in the Indian socitey from the pre independence to the post independence periods. He repeated his success with Dweepa in 2002 starring late actress Soundarya. This film won his fourth Golden Lotus award. Dweepa was different from his earlier films. His previous film Naayi Neralu dealt with a very intense and bizarre concept of reincarnation, based on the novel with the same name by S.L. Bhyrappa, Girish Kasaravalli has given a different interpretation of the subject. The International Film Festival of Rotterdam held a retrospective of Girish Kasaravalli's films in 2003.

Director: Saeed Orokzai
Story: Hamid Naweed
Music: Atash

NJ Premiere

The director and producer will be present at the screening 

Loori is the story of Meena (Leena Alam), a young Afghan girl who has lost her real parents during the Afghan-Soviet war. She has been brought up by one American couple who are anthropologists and were studying the culture of the Afghan Nomads. When she comes to the US she becomes homeless following unfortunate incidents and develops serious emotional problems. An Afghan doctor tries to help her find her lost identity. Meena runs away from the Afghan doctor's home who has her temporary custody. Out on the street, Meena meets Lorenzo, a young homeless boy who introduces her to an anti-establishment artist. She identifies herself with these two people and shares her pain with them. After a long search, the doctor finds her and tries to treat her again. Meanwhile, in her second meeting with the free-spirited artist, Meena realizes that she has to find her real self.

Director: Prasanna Vithanage
Cast: Dilhani Ekanayake, Kaushalaya Fernando, Malini Fonseka, Nimmi Harasgama

NJ Premiere    

The director will be present at the screening

Sandhya Rani (Malini Fonseka) is an ageing film star who was once the darling of the silver screen. Having lost fame and fortune in a changing world, she now lives quietly in obscurity. She ekes out a living by renting out a room in her home to the film and television stars of today who use it for their sexual escapades.

The popular young film star, Shalika (Dilhani Ekanayake), uses this room to carry on an affair with a young actor. When Shalika's infidelity is unmasked by her husband, the scandal and its publicity forces Rani into the limelight again.

In the spotlight once again, Rani is suddenly forced to come to terms with a dark secret of her past - a secret she thought she had buried forever. As she confronts the demons of her past, she journeys in search of a truth she abandoned long ago...

Prasanna Vithanage's opus of five previous films has made him one of Sri Lanka 's leading filmmakers with a worldwide critical and popular reputation. He began his career in the 1980's as a theatre director. He translated into Sinhala and directed Bernard Shaw's "Arms and the Man" in 1986 and Dario Fo's "Raspberries and Trumpets" in 1991, before setting out as a filmmaker in 1992. Despite his busy schedules, Vithanage also devotes some serious time and effort to the education and training of young people in the art and business of filmmaking. He returned to his theatrical roots in 2006 when he wrote, directed and produced two hugely popular Sinhala one act plays "Horu Samaga Heluwen" which ran to nearly 150 performances islandwide.These were based on his own translation of two short plays of Dario Fo ('The Virtuous Burglar" and "One Wore a Suit and One Wore Tails"). Vithanage also produced Uberto Pasolini's "Machan", the international co-production, which debuted at the Venice International Film Festival in Summer 2008. 

CLOSING NIGHT FILM

Director: Mazhar Kamran
Cast: Sonali Kulkarni, Nakul Vaid, Sharbani Mukherjee, Sushant Singh
Music: Vivek Priyadarshan, Narayan Parasuram

NJ Premiere

Oriental Coal Mines in Anuppur, Madhya Pradesh, is a strange place. It was a happy day when Mohandas applied for a job there and was selected. The things started going seriously wrong.

Meghna Sengupta, a correspondent working at a news channel in New Delhi, receives a videotape from remote Anuppur. On the tape there is a battered man claiming to be Mohandas and alleging that someone else has stolen his identity.

Intrigued by the strange tape, Meghna decides to investigate. What she unearths is a harrowing and surreal tale. And as it unravels, we see the tapestry of contemporary Indian society unfold with all its bizarre ills and contradictions.

Mohandas always stood out because of his brightness. Much was expected of him as he grew up. But the madness of real life catches up with him and leaves him nowhere.

Meghna comes forward and pieces together the entire sordid story of his youth. Harshvardan, a lawyer from the district, takes the matter to court. With more bizarre results. What will be the fate of Mohandas?

With irony and satire running as undercurrents, the film explores the absurd levels to which democratic institutions can be stretched in India.

How Mohan Das is stripped of his identity and dignity is reminiscent of the dehumanization of the title character in Ramgopal Varma's Satya (1998), which marked Mazhar Kamran's debut as a cinematographer.


Mazhar Kamran is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and the Film and Television Institute at Pune, the leading film school in India. He began his career as a cinematographer on Satya (Ramgopal Varma, 1998), giving this gangster film a new, gritty look. His other work includes Kaun (Ramgopal Varma, 1999), the thriller Tarkieb (Esmayeel Shroff, 2000) and the hit comedy Masti (Inder Kumar, 2004). Mohandas is his first film as director.

Director: Abu Sayeed
Cast: Mamunul Haq, Tanvin Sweety, Jayanto Chattopadhyay

US Premiere

Banshi centers around an aspiring filmmaker, Arif (Mamunul Haque), who goes to a remote village to see a country fair, where he meets Shaila (Tanveen Sweety). Both of them are taken in as guests by two influential families of the village. They become distressed when the two families get involved in a brawl over a simple matter. Arif becomes frustrated with the situation but it inspires him to visualize the theme for a movie.

Abu Sayeed is one of the leading independent filmmakers of Bangladesh. After making two acclaimed short films, Abu Sayeed started making feature films, and Banshi is his fourth. A courageous director, he does not shy away from expressing himself as he proved since his first short film "Abortion", which he made when he was only 25. His award-winning feature film NIRONTOR (FOREVER FLOWS) was screened at NJISACF 2007.

Director: Satish Manwar
Cast:  Girish Kulkarni, Sonali Kulkarni, Jyoti Subhash, Veena Jamkar, Ammanul Attar

NJ Premiere

www.thedamnedrain.com

Everyday, farmers in the Vidarbha village in Maharashtra commit suicide as their lands stay parched and their debts accumulate. Alka, a young mother, is worried and keeps a watchful eye on her husband with the help of her mother-in-law and her 6-year-old son. She sends her son to tag along with him every waking hour and to report back to her. Irritated by his wife's concerns, Kisna keeps his plans a secret. With newly found enthusiasm he plots new ways to save his field and his crops. To keep his spirits up, his wife regularly makes special treats even though it is beyond their means. This tug-of-war between happiness and sorrow only makes him all the more determined not to succumb to the tragic fate of other farmers.  

Having grown up in the area, director-writer Satish Manwar has had first hand experience of the farmers' situation. His sensitivity to their predicament is evident throughout his debut feature film. Brilliantly acted by the lead actors Girish Kulkarni and Sonali Kulkarni, THE DAMNED RAIN brings to light a much needed awareness of this epidemic.   

Director: Golam Rabbany Biplob
Cast: Mahmuduzzaman Babu, Rokeya Prachy, Fazlur Rahman Babu, Momena Choudhury, Shamima Islam Tusti

US Premiere 

Fazlu (Mahmuduzzaman Babu), now in his mid-thrities, lives in a small Bangladesh village. He is commonly known as "Kabiraj" (a herbal medicine man). In reality, he is a peddler of spurious ointments, which he sells at weekly market fairs, accompanied by Rattan, his 10-year-old son.

One day he buys a second-hand pair of imported jeans for Rattan. On washing them, his wife (Momena Choudhury) discovers a wad of foreign currency notes in a pocket. They guard this booty, hiding it away, thinking it to be a tidy sum. With no way of knowing what currency they are dealing with or how to exchange it, they are forced to seek help from trusted sources, whom they discover are only too eager to profit.

Greed soon takes over, and close relationships, including those between husband and wife, begin to crumble. 

"Director Golam Rabbany Biplob's debut work (winner of the Best Director award in the Asian New Talent Competition of the Shanghai International Film Festival) brings alive the colors and way of life in Bangladesh's countryside and looks with wry understanding at his gullible characters and the forces from outside that are influencing them." - Uma da Cunha

Director: Saqib Mausoof
Cast:  Salim Iqbal, Angeline Malik, Munawar Saeed, Ayesha Toor

East Coast Premiere 

The director will be present at the screening

Kala Pul is named after a bridge in Karachi which connects the affluent parts of the city and the lower income areas.

It is a dark journey into the heart of Karachi's militancy by the protagonist, Arsalan, who returns to this gritty megalopolis after 12 years to investigate the violent death of his brother at the hands of religious fundamentalists.  On his arrival in Karachi, Arsalan finds himself estranged from his rancorous family, in which his anglicized father is at odds with his devoutly militant younger brother. Arsalan has to navigate these diverging and conflicting paths to discover his dead brother's past and Karachi's future.

The plot uses the bridge as a metaphor providing a thriller ride between two completely different worlds - the hip side of Karachi and its disenfranchised youth growing up in the "Kalashnikov culture". 

Director: Subarna Thapa

US Premiere 

When death pays an untimely visit to a miller in a tiny village in modern day Nepal, the villagers are forced to make a decision between breaking and respecting an age old tradition.  The villagers must bury him, but those who remain are only old men, women and children. The old men are now too weak to carry the miller and lay him in his grave, and the women are not allowed to touch the dead. Above all, there is no one left from his caste for the burial. In his directorial debut, Subarna Thapa reflects on a society and its traditions that have been left behind as Nepal has entered the modern age.

Director: Venkat Goud

US Premiere 

The director will be present at the screening

Trying to spice up his marital life on the eve of his wedding anniversary, a confused husband puts into motion an uncertain plan that soon spirals out of control. Will he remain true to his "Till death do us apart" marriage vow or would he end up on the wrong side of Life's Equation?

Director: Raka Datta

US Premiere 

Courtesy: Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Kolkata, India

This is Raka Datta's graduating film from the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, where she studied film direction and scriptwriting. Minus dialogue, its story centers around a man and a woman who meet as strangers and remain so till the end. They come closer and closer to their own crises, and slowly become comfortable in their respective existences. 

Director: Sukhadia Gokhale-Bhonde

US Premiere

Hungry God uses compelling metaphoric images and forces us to reflect upon the irony of idol worship. It is an honest and spontaneous visual observation of the contrasting realities that coexist in present day India. 

Director: Sachin Edekar

The director will be present at the screening

An elderly man's life is interrupted when he learns that a close friend has been killed in the 2008 Mumbai attacks.  In the days that follow, he is forced to reexamine his estranged relationship with his son and with a Pakistani meat supplier.  Gosht Story is a story of both hope and the fragility of human relationships. 

Director: Said Mohsen Hossaini

US Premiere    

Courtesy: Rameen Moshref Javid, CEO, Chelcherogh, Senior Consultant, AwaNama Production, Afghanistan

Shelter is the first Afghan animation at all. The transition between war and peace is portrayed in a very minimalistic manner. A boy lives in a pushcart on a road. His only friend is a bird, nesting on a nearby tree. War starts and destroys everything around. After the war, the boy comes back to his pushcart and the tree, where he finds...

Director: Jutta von Stieglitz Yousufy

US Premiere

This film introduces the director of the Kabul theatre and the first group of actors performing in Kabul after the Afghan-Soviet war ended. The director returned after the war to rebuild the theatre that was in ruins. There she was reunited with the love of her life and married him. The actors talk about their problems, lack of appreciation and acceptance of their work. In spite of this, the actors survive by the strength of their courage and tenacity and their conviction that their work is important for rebuilding the society.

Director: Sofian Khan

Small voices tells the story of Alam (Ovais Jabbar/Navaid Jabbar) through interviews with a reporter (Sonia Rehman).  Alam was kidnapped at a young age along with other boys aged 5 to 12 years from countries like Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and the horn of Africa, to be smuggled across the sea to the Arab Emirates. They are trained to race camels for the pleasure of a wealthy sheikh (Hummal Ata-Shad) while facing brutal punishment from their trainers if they don't follow orders.

Director: Abbas Akbar

The director will be present at the screening

Inspired by a series of true events the film unveils the truth as it is, recreating the unforgiving and wanton world of gangsters in Singapore. The story revolves Jegan (Abbas Akbar), who suffers from an identity crisis, unconsciously wanting an image in the eyes of others. He acts upon the words of his mentor and gang leader 'Hougang' Veera (Elias Mikhail) who imports radical ideologies into him.

Jegan's ways lead him to destruction when he causes an innocent man's death and bashes up a young school boy.

Director: Aniruddho Sanyal

US Premiere        

The director will be present at the screening

Aniruddho Sanyal's maiden effort is not a straightforward biopic. In fact, as he tentatively embarks on his research into the last few weeks of RamMohun Roy's life in England, the author emerges as one of the key protagonists of this documentary. This 'pilgrimage' is almost as much the story of the West's encounter with the man widely regarded as the Father of Modern India as it is an account of Mr. Sanyal's reappraisal of his illustrious compatriot's impact on the West. With a doggedness and zeal worthy of a sleuth, the filmmaker follows up every available lead to piece together the hitherto obscure final chapter of the great reformer's life and, in the process, unearths details that will fascinate the lay viewer and have historians reaching for their notepads.  The deft camerawork, the crisp editing, the lively, often droll, commentary and the imaginative use of portraits and voice-overs it hardly looks like the work of someone new to the trade. With its ad hoc tone and its case-history format, this documentary is as absorbing, poignant and heartfelt as anything you will likely see. 

Director: Jutta von Stieglitz Yousufy

US Premiere

"Dinner for four" is a comedy about four refugees from Cameroon, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Peru, who share a kitchen in an asylum hostel. Each would like to surprise the others by cooking a traditional dish from their homeland. Naturally, their tastes are different. But not all cultures consider guinea pigs, St. Bernards or crocodiles as delicacies!

Producer: Rituporna Sengupta

US Premiere

This is the story of a terrorist who is on the verge of committing a major terrorist attack. The problem is that he is a terrorist with a weak heart.