`Midnight`s Children` slated for Feb release in India

New Delhi: Deepa Mehta`s film adaptation of Salman Rushdie`s novel `Midnight`s Children` is slated for a February release in India. The film has been doing the festival rounds already and will be released in India by PVR. "`Midnight`s Children` will most likely be released in India in February because we are trying to coincide with the international release of the film," Sanjeev Kumar Bijli, JMD, PVR Ltd, told PTI. Despite the controversial author Rushdie being involved with the project and Mehta`s earlier run-ins with fundamentalists, Bijli is not treating this release as a special case. "We don`t see any problems as such. It`s not something we are very concerned about. We`d be going about it the same way as any other product. This one is very special to us as we have an Indian director involved. It has got a great Indian cast as well. Such films are rare to come by. I`m thinking of the positives, not negatives, as of now," he said. With an ensemble cast of Shriya Saran, Rahul Bose, Soha Ali Khan, Siddharth Narayan, Anupam Kher, Shabana Azmi, Seema Biswas and Shahana Goswami, the film has been generating quite a buzz internationally. Another big film which PVR is set to distribute in India is Mira Nair`s `The Reluctant Fundamentalist`, an adaptation of Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid`s novel of the same name. The film will release here in April. "We`ve been acquiring independent English films for the past 10 years. We were tracking Mira Nair`s film for a while and finalised the deal in Cannes. We are planning to release the film both in Hindi and English across 200 screens, or maybe more depending on the time of the release," said Bijli. "It`s a great thing having these two Indian filmmakers adapting these celebrated novels into films and then trusting us with their product. It is a responsibility and a huge honour as well," he said. (MORE) PTI BB Bijli said that even though such films may have a niche audience, PVR is striving to screen all kinds of movies in India. "We are in the business of showing movies, we need to show all kinds of films. Some will cut across all segments of the society, but we do have multiplexes at locations where the audiences are very discerning," he said. PVR has distributed some major Hollywood films in India and Bijli said they have long-standing relationships with some of the major studios which enable them to bring overseas content to Indian shores. "Our criteria is to look at films which have an appeal in India, latest being the `Twilight` series which just concluded. The five films were a huge success. Then we also had Brad Pitt`s `Killing Them Softly`," said Bijli. In January, PVR is set to release Mark Wahlberg`s `The Lone Survivor`, Katheryn Bigelow`s portrayal of the hunt for Osama bin Laden in `Zero Dark Thirty` and Ewan McGregor-starrer `The Impossible`, based on the true story of a Spanish family`s experience of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. PTI