Osian’s Cinefan festival of Asian and Arab cinema turns ten this year. The festival will be screening about 200 films from 40 countries. Khadeeja Arif spoke to Joint festival director, Latika Padgaonkar, about ten year journey of the festival, its aims and aspiration, important additions to the festival over ten years and highlights of the latest edition.

What does it take to be at the helm of India’s first World Movies channel? Sample this: Seventeen years of experience in the television industry, working with brands such as National geographic, Star and Zee Cinema, a passion for movies, deep understanding of viewers and a clarity of vision. Meet Dilshad Master, the Chief Operating Officer of World Movies, A lady with a refined cinematic sensibility, and you will understand what makes her niche offering give a tough time to popular Hollywood channels.

Despite having all the ingredient of a perfect thriller, why “Via Darjeeling” takes a different turn? Did the cop make it all up or was he narrating a real incident? And why didn’t he light his cigarettes before smoking them? If you have been looking for these answers after watching “Via Darjeeling”, director Arindam Nandy shares his thoughts on his film

It looked like a usual Bollywood premier party at Mumbai’s PVR cinema lounge last evening gleaming with the presence of stars and film directors alike. But this was not your usual line up for filmfare awards, or the premiere of a star kid debut. Instead, some of Bollywood’s biggest stars had lined up to watch the premier of a Spanish horror thriller! The Bollywood bandwagon led by none other than the Big B Amitabh Bachchan assembled together to mark the beginning of the homegrown world cinema distributor NDTV Lumière’s first theatrical release: Juan Antonio Bayona’s “The Orphanage”, multiple award winner at various international festivals.

Success wasn’t guaranteed but the gamble paid off” Flanked by all the teenagers and teachers who star in Entre les murs - which screened in official competition at the 61st Cannes Film Festival - French director Laurent Cantet spoke to the international press about the sense and original method that led him to explore the subject of school through a cinematic medium combining fiction and documentary

“Buñuel y la mesa del rey Salomón (Bunuel and the table of king Solomon -2001) is the greatest film I’ve ever made. I like the film but nobody else seems to like it. I’m sure Bunuel would have loved this film. But perhaps only he would have loved it. Everything you see in the film is actually based on conversations I had with him.”

Talking about Bunuel, Saura gets nostalgic, “When I showed La Prima Angelica (Cousin Angelica) at Cannes (1974, where it won the jury prize), it was an honor for me to hear him saying that it’s a film that he would have loved to make himself.”

After Katyn – a political film – I wanted to return to psychological cinema: Wajda
Katyn, the latest film by Polish master Andrej Wajda was premiered at Berlin. Mumbai will witness on Thursday the Asian premier of the Oscar nominated film. Katyn narrates the story of the Polish officers who were murdered near the forest of […]

The Counterfeiter by Stefan Ruzowitzky has won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. The film, based on Adolf Burger’s memoirs of the Nazi period, tells the story of Salomon Sorowitsch, king of fraudsters in a world of gamblers, gigolos and easy women, who is forced by the Nazis to use his counterfeiting talents on the trading floor, caught up in a war in which he is destined to perish. Like other Jews recruited in the concentration camps