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Meera Syal, star of Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at No 42, was there. “I’m really pleased to be supporting the innovative Tongues On Fire film festival again this year,” she said at London’s National Film Theatre. “And I’m especially honoured that… I get to be interviewed by the formidably brilliant (celebrity playwright) Bonnie Greer who will no doubt have a good laugh at the array of hairstyles I’ve paraded over my career. If it wasn’t for Tongues On Fire, many of the wonderful films they’re showing would not be seen at all over here.”
These include the Mahima Chaudhary-starrer Hope and a Little Sugar. Directed by Tanuja Chandra, it is set in New York City in the weeks immediately before and after 9/11 — and is billed as “a poignant tale of love”. It follows a romance between a Muslim photographer and a young Sikh widow.
Mira Nair, champion of South Asian diasporic film (Monsoon Wedding, The Namesake) is also in the line-up. Her tale from HIV-positive India, Migration, follows interweaving lives and transmission from urban to rural India and reportedly views AIDS as society’s “new class leveller”.It will be joined by other movies focussing on HIV at the festival, including Blood Brothers (directed by Vishal Bhardwaj), Prarambha (Santosh Sivan) and Positive (Farhan Akhtar).Meanwhile, fans of the recent film version of Brick Lane will be able to take part in a film workshop with its director, Sarah Gavron.And Calcutta will hold up the festival’s rear: Dosar, scheduled for the closing gala, is set in urban contemporary Calcutta. Rituparno Ghosh weaves a yarn around marriage and infidelity: love and self-sacrifice are said to be its big themes.
Also this week: It may have been denied release in Rajasthan and banned in Madhya Pradesh, but the Aishwarya Rai-starrer Jodhaa Akbar has stormed the UK box office. The film was one of just two new entries in the UK top 10, bagging £365,785 in its opening weekend.Those figures were all the more remarkable when you consider that the film played at only 46 theatres. The critics were also glowing: Britain’s Times newspaper called it “visually stunning” and “well worth a visit”.In fact, Ashutosh Gowariker’s contentious period epic is said to be doing spectacularly well not just in the UK, but around the world. It reportedly grossed around $8.1m from 15 regions in its first week. The upshot: those attacking cinemas screening the film in India don’t seem to be having much consequence. This version of Akbar’s takeover of the subcontinent — with its lavish scenes casting thousands of real elephants amidst vast sword fights — looks set to achieve world takeover — if not a period of prolonged global domination.
