Amit Kumar’s directorial debut Monsoon Shootout is India’s official selection at Cannes. It’s eligible for an award called Camera d’Or or the Golden camera, awarded to first films.
Tannishtha Chatterjee, who recently won a National Award for Dekh Indian Circus, features with Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Vijay Verma in this, “psychological thriller about a cop who must take a moral decision concerning the arrest of a gangster.”
Before leaving for Cannes, Tannishtha shared that she would be wearing a blue dress by Aussie label Truese for the film’s midnight screening.
“With accessories put together by Vanessa, a friend of mine.”
Chatterjee will begin shooting for Partho Sen Gupta’s Sunrise, about child trafficking, and Feast in Varanasi, in which she plays a cop. She is also “going to shoot a Bengali film in london this August.”
In Monsoon Shootout she is a gangster’s wife. And there is a relationship involving their son, a boy around eight or nine. And yes, her character’s going to be “the suffering kind.”
She laughed saying this.
The film is co-produced by Anurag Kashyap and Asif Kapadia, with the UK Film Council Development fund.
This collaboration means, “the subject is beyond local interest,” explained the actress who has walked Cannes red carpet several times before.
She added, “One Dutch company also provided funding, because they felt it had the potential to be universal like City of God.” She was referring here to the Brazilian film about children and violence.
Bombay Talkies with short films by Karan Johar, Zoya Akhtar, Dibaker Bannerjee and Anurag Kashyap will be screened in India’s honour. A restored version of Satyajit Ray’s Charulata will be screened in the Cannes Classic section. Two other films are crafting a buzz in the two sidebar sections that are closely allied to the main festival. Anurag Kashyap’s Ugly and Ritesh Batra’s Dabba starring Irrfan and Nawazuddin Siddiqui are in the Director’s Fortnight and Critics week respectively.
–Shana Maria Verghis