Thursday, October 04, 2012

'Screen savers' in Vogue

The bulky October issue of Vogue India – the fifth-anniversary issue – has 10 short profiles I have done on interesting young "experimenters" in contemporary Hindi cinema, across categories (e.g. Music Director: Sneha Khanwalkar, Film Editor: Namrata Rao, Casting Agent: Nandini Shrikent, Actor: Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Wild Card: Qaushiq Mukherjee a.k.a. Q). Nothing very indepth – these are just 200-250-word pieces, written to a specific brief – but it was nice to speak with these people and collect a few notes on their work. (This was also the first full-length assignment I said yes to after Foxie died, and it’s really the only sort of assignment I could have done during that time: conducting short interviews on the phone or on email, and writing snappy pieces that didn't require too much concentration.)

Apart from those mentioned above, the others in the list are writer-director Anusha Rizvi, scriptwriter Juhi Chaturvedi, documentary filmmaker Faiza Ahmed Khan, cinematographer Nikos Andritsakis, and Anurag Kashyap (featured here not as a director but as a mentor to younger filmmakers). Do keep an eye out for the magazine.

3 comments:

  1. Brilliant list.
    Agreed with each one of them!

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  2. Okay, one crib: Maybe Mukesh Chhabra instead of Nandini Shrikent as Casting Director. Not only has he cast more unusually (Kaminey, Wasseypur), he is now 'immortalised' in the Cadbury ad! :-)

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  3. Diptakirti: it wasn't meant to be a definitive list or anything, just one of many possibilities. Tricky thing about putting it together was that they wanted one representative film for each personality (for a minimalist-poster design to go with the piece) and there had to be 10 different films - no overlaps. So we had to work with that brief.

    Rahul: no, not yet.

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