Shyam Benegal to be honored at the Third Eye Asian Film Festival

The 3rd Eye Asian Film Festival is going to honour the renowned filmmaker of Indian cinema - Shyam Benegal. This grand festival will be organized from 29th October to 14th November in Mumbai. In this festival, 80 films and 50 short movies from the Asian countries will be showed.

The director of this festival, Sudhir Nandgaonkar, stated that Benegal will be honored because of his experience in cinema. Sudhir also said that Shyam Benegal has been a great force in Bollywood and he will be given the Asian Film Culture award. Some of the famous movies of Shyam Benegal include Ankur, Junoon, Kalyug etc

Nandgaonkar also informed that the festival will be inaugurated by Son of Babylon, an Iraqi film. The Asian Film Culture award is given to the Asian directors for providing respect to their experience and to honor their achievements. This festival will also showcase 6 films by renowned Indian filmmaker Mrinal Sen.

More significance to regional language films at the National Film Awards

In order to provide more significance and spotlight to the regional language films at the National Film Awards, the government has decided to soon introduce a new two-tier selection system. The delayed selections for the year 2009 Awards will be announced under the new system.

This decision comes on the basis of recommendations which was submitted by an expert committee. This committee was headed by filmmaker Shyam Benegal.
For this new procedure, five regional panels will be constituted to select the various best films in their own areas. Then a central jury will make the final award decision.

The northern region will include films in languages like English, Punjabi, Dogri, Urdu, Bhojpuri, Rajasthani and central Indian languages. The western region will include films of Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and Konkani languages. Similarly the other regions will also have certain categories.

Priyanka and Katrina fight for Youth Icon Award

The bollywood leading and hot actresses Priyanka Choupra and Katrina Kaif are set to fight for the Youth Icon Award. Both Priyanka and Katrina have been nominated for the Videocon Youth Icon Award in the entertainment division. The actor-director Farhan Akhtar and oustanding actor Hrithik Roshan have also been nominated for the same.




Rahul bose, the founder of the NGO ( The organization which takes care of the affairs related to education and child abuse), has been nominated for his contribution to the social welfare. The awards will be bestowed to people for their exceptional contribution to the society and for various categories like sports, technology, media, politics, arts, private entreprenureship, entertainment and social welfare.

The nominations have been decided on the basis of various experts' judgements. The experts list include journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, filmmaker Shyam Benegal, tennis ace Leander Paes, renowned cardiologist Naresh Trehan, actor and social activist Shabana Azmi, singer Usha Uthup and Venugopal Dhoot, chairman of Videocon Industries Limited. Award winners will be chosen through online voting and awards will be distributed on 25th september.

11th Mumbai Festival Fest

Veteran actor Shashi Kapoor, who enthralled cinegoers with his performances in blockbusters like “Deewar” and “Namak Halal”, will be honoured with the lifetime achievement award at the 11th edition of the Mumbai Film Festival (MFF) to be held between Oct 29-Nov 5 along with Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos.




Shashi Kapoor, who started his career as a child artist with his brother’s film “Awara”, went on to feature in movies like “Kala Patthar”, “Kabhi Kabhie”, “Shaan” and “Trishul”. He also produced
critically acclaimed movies like “Junoon”, “Kalyug”, “36 Chowringhee Lane”, “Vijeta”, and “Utsav”.

The film festival is an initiative by Reliance Big Entertainment and is being organized by Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI).Renowned filmmaker Shyam Benegal is the chairperson of MAMI and he made these announcements.

This year the MFF will also organise an exhibition to commemorate and celebrate 60 years of evergreen actor Dev Anand’s production house Navketan Films. A retrospective from Navketan will be screened to mark the occasion.

Divided into five sections — International Competition for the First Feature Films of Directors, World Cinema, Indian Showcase, Dimensions Mumbai and Retrospectives, the festival offers something to every film buff.

The festival will have a five member international jury including the likes of celebrated Hollywood scriptwriter-director Paul Schrader, who penned “Taxi Driver” and Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi.

MFF carries some of the biggest cash awards.

The movies will be screened at Fun Republic 4 screens multiplex in
Andheri, Mumbai.