Tthe chase goes on: Shah Rukh and Priyanka in Don

The 37th International Film Festival of India (IFFI) may start in Goa from November 23, but there was an announcement in the city on Friday afternoon. The reason? “Involvement of the regional film industries, and none is more important than Calcutta,” said Nikhil Desai, general manager, Entertainment Society of Goa.

Also present was Goa’s minister for art and culture Digambar Vasant Kamat, who said: “In another couple of years we want IFFI to be known as the Goa Film Festival, very much like Cannes.”

The real reason of doing the rounds of metros — the two of them also went to Mumbai and Delhi — may be to clear questions about security. “The Centre has asked us to be on alert and we are using all possible precautions to make sure that IFFI goes smoothly like the last two years.”

Safe or not, IFFI has got a great line-up of films this year. If a festival starts with Spanish auteur Almodovar’s Volver (starring Penelope Cruz) and ends with Mexican maker Inarritu’s Babel (Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett), can it possibly go wrong?

In between, there are around 180 more films. Cinema of the World, Indian Panorama, Indian Retrospectives, Indian mainstream section, NFDC Down the Ages, Indian premieres... there are films aplenty at the festival.

The Indian tributes this year go to Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Nadira, Naushad, Dr Raj Kumar, Oduvil Unnikrishnan, P Bhanumati, Padmini, Prithviraj Kapoor, SD Burman and Satyajit Ray. The international retrospectives include Spanish actor Javier Bardem and Australian director Rolf De Heer.

Of the Tollywood films to be shown at the festival, there is Rituparno Ghosh’s Dosar, Saibal Mitra’s Songshoy, Anjan Dutt’s The Bong Connection and Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Anuranon.

Volver volley: Penelope Cruz

Wives’ tale

Rojgere Ginni, the popular women’s show on ETV Bangla, has stepped out of Bengal to travel to Mumbai. The non-fiction programme has now started a segment on the women in the lives of Bengalis who have made it big in Bollywood.

Running for the past five years, Rojgere Ginni trains the spotlight on home-makers and their families, capturing their likes and dislikes, passions and pastimes.

This November, the ETV Bangla camera zooms into the households of a host of probashi Bangalis, including film-maker Basu Chatterjee and actor Biswajit, with Madhumanti Maitra and Lajbonti as anchors.

High on the list of better-halves through the winter months are Panchali (wife of Pradeep Sarkar), Taani (wife of Anurag Basu), Sarada (wife of Shantanu Moitra), Jhuma (wife of Shoojit Sircar) and Rajoshi (wife of Ashish Vidyarthi).

The Mumbai episodes are being aired on Saturdays and Sundays, apart from the regular Monday-to-Friday shows.

Comic Don

Shah Rukh Khan might soon be hitting the stands as a comic character! Producer Ritesh Sidhwani is all set to launch an 80-page comic book, based on the plot of the SRK-starrer Don.

“We were approached by a company, we liked idea and gave the go ahead,” said Sidhwani. “It will be similar to a coffee-table book and we plan to publish a couple of thousand copies initially.”

Aimed at the kids, the book will be launched in the third week of the film, which was released on October 20. “After the tremendous response that Don received from kids, it motivated us to go ahead and make the comic book. SRK himself was very involved in the entire process and he is very excited about the book,” added Sidhwani.

The characters will look like the stars themselves and some of the famous dialogues will be straight out of the film.

Interestingly, this year’s two other big films, Lage Raho Munnabhai and Krrish, will also have comic book avatars. Munnabhai producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra is reportedly planning to launch the book to coincide with Munnabhai and Circuit’s third outing at the box-office. Krrish too should arrive in comic books before he leaps on to the big screen again.

Sources say that the Don comic books will be distributed free at multiplexes against the tickets of the film, but Calcutta distributor Shree Venkatesh’s Mahendra Soni says he is not yet aware of such developments.