Nandana Dev Sen in Cannes. Telegraph picture

Cannes, May 19: Forget Aishwarya Rai, the L’Oreal girl. Cannes has a new Indian star —Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen’s glamorous actress daughter, Nandana Dev Sen.

Nandana, star of what her co-producer, Aanand Mahendroo, described as “the hottest Indian movie for years” — Ketan Mehta’s Colours of Passion — immediately turned heads as she walked along the Croisette today dressed in a simple blue sari that effortlessly matched the colours of the Mediterranean.

She was born in Calcutta, grew up in London, studied in America and now lives in Mumbai, but asked by The Telegraph how she felt, she replied: “I am absolutely Bengali.”

One cameraman was so mesmerised by the sight of the dark-eyed Bengali beauty in front of the Carlton Hotel (hang-out joint for Hollywood A-listers) that he stopped filming whatever he was filming and pursued Nandana.

Colours of Passion tells the story of the Indian painter Raja Ravi Varma, his passionate relationship with his “muse”, Sugandha, and how he fought and won a court battle (much as M.F. Husain has had to do a century later) after painting Indian gods and goddesses and being charged with obscenity at the end of the 19th century.

The role of the iconic painter, whose work now fetches very high prices at auctions in London and New York, has gone to Randeep Hooda — he got the part after co-producer Deepa Sahi saw him in the gangster movie D.

Mehta, whose last movie was The Rising: The Ballad of Mangal Pandey, starring Aamir Khan, said he had wanted to make a film on Raja Ravi Varma after first encountering his paintings when he was at film school in Pune. The desire became stronger after he had read a biographical novel based on the painter’s life written by Ranjit Desai.

Colours of Passion, which has been shot in English and in Hindi, is due to release next month but may be held back if accepted for competition at the Venice Film Festival.

The film has been made with a budget of $3 million but what is remarkable is that Mahendroo is putting another $4 million in marketing. He has already spent nearly half a million dollars in Cannes, taking 1,730 30-sec spots on video screens. The film also has a poster opposite the Palais Des Festivals.

Mehta pointed out that Raja Ravi Varma, born into an aristocratic family in Travancore, “was the most celebrated Indian painter of the 19th century. Acknowledged as the father of modern Indian art, he was the first to depict Hindu gods and goddesses in realistic paintings. Even today, over half a billion people pray in front of colourful prints of gods and goddesses inspired by Ravi Varma paintings.

He was a significant figure in another way, according to Mehta. “Dada Saheb Phalke, considered the father of Indian cinema, started his career as an apprentice with Raja Ravi Varma.”

When he approached Nandana, she jumped at the offer. It so happened that in her Bombay flat she already had two reproductions of Ravi Varma paintings.