News

While Indian cinema still remains toplined by Hindi cinema to overseas audiences, the fact is that India now lives in a post-Baahubali world, where regional cinemas are regularly churning out films that could give Hindi cinema a run for their money. The Bengali film industry, based out of Kolkata, is one such industry that reportedly churns out at least a hundred films every year. These films are made with budgets ranging from Inr 70 lakh to Inr 3 crore, which seriously curtail the subjects these films can tackle. However, in recent years, Svf Entertainment has been trying to up the ante when it comes to big-screen experiences for the Bengali audiences. Formerly known as Shree Venkatesh Films, they adapted Chander Pahar (Mountain Of The Moon),...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Kolkata, Jan 22: Shot extensively in South Africa, Bengali blockbuster film "Chander Pahar (Mountain of the Moon)" has generated huge interest among travellers from West Bengal, said a South African tourism official.

Kamaleshwar Mukherjee's film, the most expensive Bengali celluloid outing till date, was filmed for 45 days in the 'Rainbow Nation'.

Based on author Bibhutibhushan Banerjee's novel, the movie was shot in locales like the Kruger National Park, Kalahari Desert, jungles of Mpumalanga, Elands River valley, Blyde River Canyon and the majestic Drakensberg Mountains.

Hanneli Slabber, country manager of South.

Winner of 10 Best Actor awards and counting, Indian superstar Dev has won both critical and commercial success in his career and now tackles his most ambitious film project yet with the Africa-set adventure Chander Pahar (“Mountain of the Moon”) which opens this Friday, January 10, in Us theaters with English subtitles.

The acclaimed actor recently sat down to discuss this challenging new role in this exclusive new interview.

Did you have a connection to this novel before taking on this film?

Chander Pahar is a book which almost all Bengalis grow up reading. I knew the story, and read it after I was offered the film. And when I read it I thought, ‘Can this be made into a film? Is it even possible?’ I had a whole lot of questions after reading the book a few times. I wanted to know how we would show Shankar with the lion… it should look credible.

Award-winning director Kamaleswar Mukherjee has won acclaim for his many films but now tackles his most ambitious motion picture to date bringing to screen an iconic adventure novel thought to be unfilmable in Chander Pahar (“Mountain of the Moon”) which opens in Us theaters with English subtitles on January 10, 2014.

The filmmaker, who recently won the Centenary Award at the 2013 International Film Festival of India, sat down to discuss the making of this highly anticipated movie in this new interview below.

How did taking on a project like Chander Pahar differ from past films?

It certainly was very different from the films I have done in the past. My earlier films had received immense applause from critics; I felt that they were commercially unviable. With Chander Pahar, I took on a competent, commercial film that would both be accepted by the critics and loved by the audiences.

Tell us about how...

Based on the popular Bengali novel of the same name, Chander Pahar is an unfocused adventure-cum-travelogue.

At first, writer-director Kamaleswar Mukherjee's adaptation is an homage to the domestic melodramas of Ritwik Ghatak, the subject of Mukherjee's directorial debut. Pressured by his concerned mother, 20-year-old daydreamer Shankar Chowdhury (Dev Adhikari) leaves home and becomes a stationmaster for the Uganda Railway, resulting in a preposterous man-vs.-nature narrative.

Shankar stubbornly ignores multiple lion assaults and one black mamba molestation — all captured in slow-motion, compounding Dev's already awkward performance — so he can make like David Livingstone and master, in Shankar's words, "the Dark Continent." Then, after saving fellow...