Browsing: ‘Midnight’s Children’

It’s not every day that New York actor Samrat Chakrabarti, who’s acted in a ton of movies and TV shows, gets to go back to his roots and star in a Bengali film. And a Hitchcockian thriller, no less! Samrat, who grew up in London, is currently in Calcutta – the city where his parents grew up and he’s seeing himself, larger than life, on huge billboards in the city.

Samrat, who’s done two big movies in the North and South of India – ‘Midnight’s Children’ and ‘Vishwaroopam’ respectively, is doing a movie in Calcutta for the first time and that too in Bengali. The film is ‘Sada Kalo Abcha’, directed by the innovative digital filmmaker Riingo Banerjee, known as the most experimental and technology driven filmmaker in Tollywood. The entire film has been shot with a range of Panasonic cameras.

‘Midnight’s Children’ – a major film collaboration born out of an epic book – and film-goers are waiting in excited anticipation, popcorn and soda ready.
At a preview screening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, author Salman Rushdie and director Deepa Mehta were in a fun mood, completing each other’s sentences, putting a light-hearted spin on things, and what came through clearly is the rapport they share.

I think I’ll entertain you all meanwhile with the goings on of that evening.

“I think acting, especially in something as delicate as this, is like when you’re switching a radio knob to look for a correct frequency and you know the program you want to listen to is at 99.5 and you don’t get it. You try 4 and you try 6 and you still don’t get it and you feel that you’ve lost it forever, it doesn’t exist.
And then suddenly at 99.48 something happens and you suddenly can hear very clearly the song you were looking for, the radio station you were looking for. It’s really a chance – you have to try hard but ultimately it’s a lot to do with chance and I think I got lucky. At least I hope so!”
(Rahul Bose seen here with Minu Tharoor)