hand of god: Kamal Haasan enters the Walk of Fame, as Santhosh looks on

The projectionist in the much-loved Giuseppe Tornatore film Cinema Paradiso, Alfredo, maintained that ?life isn?t like in the movies? it is much harder.? Perhaps, as an anti-thesis to this legendary line from the classic, the DVD rental library chain Cinema Paradiso has the tagline: Life is Reel.

With the ticket stub ? you have to preserve it till the show is over ? as its motif, this nationwide video lending chain formally opened its Calcutta doors at the Rowland Road address on Tuesday afternoon, with Kamal Haasan cutting the red ribbon in the presence of former south Indian actress Gautami. No surprises there, since the library was conceptualised by three Tamil youngsters and has its head office in Chennai.

?Although we are officially opening the Calcutta branch from today, we have been taking in memberships for three-four months now as a test run,? reveals the ?promoter? of Cinema Paradiso, Santhosh, whose hobby of collecting original DVDs started the chain in the first place. ?We are trying to reach out to cities where there are active film industries. Apart from Chennai, we have branches in Bangalore and Hyderabad. We are opening soon in Mumbai, Pune and Delhi.?

With more than 4,000 titles in the double-decked library, what makes Cinema Paradiso special is the way it stacks the movies. While the Oscar Winners section has everything from Ben Hur to Million Dollar Baby, the other award-winning section has movies that triumphed at festivals like Cannes, Sundance and Berlin.

So, you can pick up an Irreversible or a Y Tu Tu Mama Tambien alongside the commerical fare. The separate World Cinema category packs in quite a punch and as Santhosh rightly says: ?You do not need to wait for the film festival to watch these modern-day classics.?

The best category is, without doubt, the Director?s Special where you can catch up on the entire filmographies of everyone from Satyajit Ray and Raj Kapoor to Akira Kurosawa and Oliver Stone to Clint Eastwood and Andrzej Wazda. The Latest Film section already boasts of titles like Crash, Capote and Wallace & Gromit.

?Since we have tied up with home entertainment companies in the US, we get new titles almost two weeks before they are available at American stores,? claims Santhosh. ?Almost 80 per cent of our films are brought in from the US, the rest from UK and Germany.?

While the Bengali section is yet to be spruced up, Cinema Paradiso scores with its exclusive sections for music videos and commercials. You can even find a scriptwriting DVD on the shelves. Just behind the shop, a Walk of Fame is being set up a la the forecourt of the Grauman Chinese Theatre which too was launched on Tuesday afternoon, with Kamal Haasan the first one to get his hands dirty.

On the Cinema Paradiso wishlist is a whole series of DVD launches. ?We plan to get people like A.R. Rahman and Mani Ratnam to come to Calcutta in the coming months and release DVDs,? reveals Santhosh. At the moment, plans are on to empower the library with more and more movies. A lifetime membership comes for Rs 3,000 of which Rs 2,000 is refundable. Once a member, you can borrow a DVD from Cinema Paradiso for Rs 75 to Rs 100 and can keep it for three nights.