‘Vihir’ director wins Hubert Bals fund for co-production

Panaji: ‘Vihir’ director Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni has won the Hubert Bals award and a cash prize of 5000 Euros for his next project at the IFFI film market, which saw participation from more than 400 delegates from 33 countries including the SAARC nations.

The other big beneficiaries of the NFDC Film Bazaar, which concluded yesterday at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) 2010, were Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee, who found co-producers from Europe. CineMart of the Rotterdam International Film Festival, has selected four young producers, Guneet Manga for the film `Urban Moon` from Anurag Kashyap Films, Ritesh J Batra for the film `Story of Ram`, Rajesh Shera for `Echoes` from Rajesh, Priya Sreedharan for `Shanghai` from Dibakar Banerjee Productions. The chosen four will be trained at the Rotterdam Lab as the emerging producers. Three of the projects from SAARC countries, which were participating for the first time, also received positive response from the producers. Marco Mueller, Director of the Venice Film Festival, who is credited with taking Anurag Kashyap`s films to the international arena, attended a Master class. "Film Bazaar is a meaningful and extremely effective opportunity that foreign delegates including market operators, festival programmers, sales agents have been offered. It brings us up close and personal with Indian talent and see the way Indian cinema is changing and growing. Market screenings is an organized platform, a rare opportunity, to see the latest works of emerging filmmakers," Mueller said. Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin, Rajkumar Hirani, Govind Nihlani, Rakyesh Om Prakash Mehra, Dibakar Banerjee, Anurag Kashyap and Onir participated in the film bazaar. PTI