Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali was the last Indian film to grab honors at Cannes.
By The American Bazaar Staff
MUMBAI: Bollywood has become an increasingly large part of the Cannes Film Festival over the last several years, and this year, one of its biggest studios will showcase two of the festival’s most high-profile entries.
Yash Raj Films will be rolling out Grace of Monaco and Titli (“Butterfly”) at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The former is the first co-production undertaken by YRF Entertainment, the studio’s Los Angeles-based wing, and will serve as the festival’s opening night film. Long in production and hotly anticipated, the film was meant to debut late last year and feature heavily in the 2013 awards season, but was pulled from the Weinstein Company’s distribution schedule at the last minute.
Grace of Monaco is a biographical tale of the famous actress Grace Kelly, played in the film by Academy Award-winner Nicole Kidman (Moulin Rouge). The film will pay special attention to Kelly’s time after leaving Hollywood, when she married Prince Ranier III of Monaco and helped mediate a tense diplomatic standoff between her husband and French President Charles de Gaulle in 1962. The film also stars Tim Roth (Reservoir Dogs) and Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon).
Titli is a full-on Hindi production, but atypical by Bollywood standards. Reminiscent of The Godfather, the film is about a family of criminals and carjackers in the wastelands outside of New Delhi. Three brothers are in line to become the next head of the family, but the youngest brother, whose name is Titli, plots a way out for himself in a bid to leave the family business behind him for good.
The film is a co-production between YRF and Dibakar Banerjee, whose Dibakar Banerjee Productions financed a large portion of the production. The film stars Ranvir Shorey, Amit Sial and debutante Shashank Arora, and is directed by Kanu Behl. The lack of big names, both in front of and behind the camera, may make the film a tough sell in the normally star-driven Bollywood market, but good word-of-mouth from a prestigious festival like Cannes can drive up ticket sales.
“Titli’s success at Cannes is the way forward for Indian cinema,” said Banerjee, in a statement, “A hot new talent, one of India’s biggest studios and an independent production house pooled their strengths to present a raw, intense, rooted, yet universal Indian narrative to the world — not Bollywood, but simply world cinema from India.”
The film is competing in the Un Certain Regard section of the festival, and is the only Indian film to be screened for any kind of award. Despite their growing presence at Cannes, Indian films do not have the best track record of success. Films like Udaan, in 2010, have screened in the same section of the festival, and last year, Cannes hosted a screening of current art house hit The Lunchbox, but no film has won the festival’s top prize in nearly 60 years.
The Palme d’Or, Cannes’ highest honor and one of the most prestigious film prizes in the world, was last given to an Indian film in 1956: Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, the first film in his famed “Apu Trilogy.”
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