Bollywood Stars & Red Carpets

Bollywood and art film directors, actors and crew gather with film curators and volunteers and MIAAC director Aroon Shivdasani at the conclusion of the MIAAC film festival — Bollywood actors & crew gather with film curators, volunteers & MIAAC director Aroon Shivdasani at the conclusion of the MIAAC film festival

South Asian flavored, Movies from Everywhere…

Bollywood, Hollywood, art cinema, documentaries and shorts all came together in that swirling melange of new and exciting films at the Mahindra 2010 Indo American Art Council Film Festival known as MIAAC. With events, movies, panels and Q and A’s, not to mention parties and more parties and after-parties, filmholics got to go on a binge.

It was a celebration of cinema in all its avatars: as Aroon Shivdasani of MIAAC pointed out, this time there were lots of movies with non-Indian collaboration – movies made by Australians, Canadians and even Israelis, though all touching upon India. There was Aparna Sen’s lyrical ‘The Japanese Wife’ shot in Japan as well as in India, while Deepa Mehta’s ‘Cooking with Stella’ moves from Canada to India.

There were films not just in Hindi and English but also in Tamil, Konkani and Gujarati, movies dealing with everything from music to plastic surgery to mental illness and sports. As Shivdasani said, ” This time we got a fabulous, truly independent and Diaspora festival. This is really the first time we’ve pretty much represented India on the whole, within and without India.”

Indeed there was also a wonderful mix of Indian and Indian-American stars, emerging and big names. Some of the stars walking the red carpet included Mani Ratnam, Sendhil Ramamurthy, Ekta Kapoor, Tusshar Kapoor, Seema Biswas, and Rahul Bose along with the New York celebrities like Salman Rushdie, Mira Nair, Sarita Chowdhury, and Padma Lakshmi.

Star-spotting turned into spectator sport, with celebs – both from behind and front of the camera – swirling around.