Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles and actor Deepti Naval will be honoured with the Excellence in Cinema awards at Jio MAMI 21st Mumbai Film Festival with Star. Mr. Meirelles will conduct a masterclass and introduce his Netflix film, The Two Popes , which will be screened at the festival.
Mr. Meirelles said, “As a director who makes his home on the opposite side of the world from where this festival takes place, I am humbly reminded that cinema is the perfect conduit for people to recognise and celebrate our shared humanity.”
Fernando Meirelles
Jury members
The jury for India Gold, a competitive section for contemporary Indian cinema, will be headed by film producer, cultural commentator, professor and entrepreneur Franklin Leonard, who will also conduct a masterclass. Other members on the jury include founder and CEO of IMDb Col Needham; director of the film department and deputy general delegate of the Cannes Film Festival, Christian Jeune; and festival director of the Dublin International Film Festival, Grainne Humphreys.
Less than a third of the 190 films part of the festival was also revealed on Monday in the presence of MAMI Board of Trustees and filmmakers Zoya Akhtar and Vishal Bhardwaj, Rohan Sippy and producer Siddharth Roy Kapur, along with festival director Anupama Chopra and artistic director Smriti Kiran. The eight-day festival, which begins on October 17, has 13 world premieres this year. The festival line-up includes films of renowned filmmakers like Werner Herzog ( Family Romance), Ken Loach (Sorry We Missed You), Lav Diaz (Ang hupa), François Ozon (Grâce à Dieu), Olivier Assayas (Wasp Network), Fatih Akin (Der Goldene Handschuh), and Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne(Le Jeune Ahmed), Luca Guadagnino (The Staggering Girl), and Pedro Almodovar (Pain and Glory).
(From left) Vishal Bhardwaj, Zoya Akhtar, Smriti Kiran, Siddharth Roy Kapur, and Ajay Bijli with MAMI festival director Anupama Chopra in Mumbai on Monday.
Six Netflix titles
The festival will have six Netflix titles including Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, which had its world premiere at the 57th New York Film Festival last week, and Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story , which premiered at the Venice film festival in August. The influential French filmmaker Agnès Varda, who passed away early this year at the age of 90, will be remembered in her documentary, Varda par Agnès. Palestine’s entry to the Oscars in the Best Foreign Film category, Elia Suleiman’s It Must Be Heaven, will also be screened.
Opening film: Moothon
Geethu Mohandas’s Malayalam film Moothon , which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, will open MAMI this year. The festival organisers said that other films in the line-up will be revealed in the run-up to the festival, including the International Competition section. With its 21st edition, the festival will introduce a new business-to-business initiative called the ‘Industry Program’, bringing together industry professionals from India and around the world for one-on-one sessions. “We want to bring filmmakers and writers closer and go beyond boundaries,” said Ms. Kiran.
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