Hindi
City of pearls all decked up to host 16th International children’s film festival
NEW DELHI: Over eighty films from around twenty countries are to be screened during the 16th International Children’s Film Festival commencing here on Children’s Day, 14 November.
The films include 15 films in the international competition, 18 in the Asian Panorama, 36 in Children’s World, sixteen films made by children for UNICEF, and a package of German shorts. A five-member international and ten-member child juries will judge both sections.
The Festival is being organized by the Children’s Film Society, India, in collaboration with the Andhra Pradesh State Film, Theatre and Television Development Corporation. The Festival, which will have its inauguration and closing ceremonies at the Lalitha Kala Thoranam, will close on 20 November.
Andhra Pradesh Information Minister J Geetha Reddy said at a press meet here that Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni and Andhra Chief Minister K Rosaiah will be present at the inauguration which will be managed by children. Filmmakers Gulzar and Vishal Bhardwaj are also expected to be present, in addition to stars like Venkatesh, Nagarjuna, Trishna and Darsheel Safary.
She said a mini-film festival would also be held in the Andhra Bhavan in Delhi.
CFSI Chairperson Nandita Das said the jury members include Nagesh Kukunoor, Revathy Menon, Ashish Vidyarthi, Geetanjali Rao, and Dr Shanta Sinha of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights.
She announced that the opening film will be ‘Mozart in China’ after a cultural programme by the Children.
She gave an assurance that Hyderabad will continue to remain the permanent venue for the Festival.
Ms Karin Hulshrof who represented UNICEF said around 15 films made by children from India and overseas will be shown in a special package put together by UNICEF at the 16th ICFF to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Convention of the Rights of the Child. The Convention was signed on 20 November twenty years earlier.
She said the films in the package had been made by child reporters on issues affecting them. She reflected that children were able to make better films when they were able to talk to other kids and adults candidly. There will be a workshop on training children as reporters during the Festival.
A total of around sixty delegates were coming from overseas for the Festival, which is held every second year and alternates with the Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentary, Short and Animation Films (being held in February 2010).
Das said the Festival will also have an open forum on different subjects everyday. Two of the subjects for the open forums would include discussions on introducing films in school curriculum, and what constituted a children’s film.
Nagesh Kukunoor who was present said cinema was an extremely strong platform to get the message across. But he regretted that children’s films do not sell that well.
Mr Sushovan Banerjee, Chief Executive Officer of the CFSI, said around 16,000 children from different schools were expected to come for the festival, and at least two child delegates had come from each state in the country. He said there will be two shows everyday at Indira Priyardarshini for blind children. These will be CFSI films with audio description facilities.
APSFTTDC Managing Director C Parthasarthi said after this festival, the films will be taken to several districts to be shown there. The Corporation will acquire the films from the CFSI.
The Festival films will be screened in Prasad Multiplex and eight other screens. The open Forum will also be at Prasad’s Multiplex.
Hindi
Jio Studios unveils AI-powered Krishna teaser at NAB Show 2026
Global first look of Krishna uses Galleri5 AI pipeline on Azure, Historyverse slate as Jio’s Dhurandhar crosses Rs 3,000cr worldwide.
MUMBAI: Krishna has just dropped a divine teaser and this time the gods are powered by silicon, not just scripture. Jio Studios and Collective Studios’ Historyverse stole the spotlight at the NAB Show 2026 in Las Vegas with the world’s first teaser for their upcoming theatrical feature Krishna, directed by Manu Anand. The big reveal happened during Microsoft’s keynote “Powering Intelligent Media, From AI Experimentation to Real-World Impact,” where the film’s AI-native production pipeline took centre stage alongside Collective Artists Network’s in-house platform, Galleri5.
At the heart of this mythological spectacle lies a fresh cinematic workflow built by Galleri5 on Microsoft Azure’s advanced AI and cloud infrastructure. Forget bolting AI onto traditional VFX or animation, this is an end-to-end, production-grade system woven into every layer: world-building, character creation, shot design and final output. Yet the storytelling remains firmly director-led, emphasising emotional depth, stillness, music and performance rather than pure spectacle. The result? Large-format theatrical cinema rooted in Indian history and culture, but conceived in ways that were simply not possible before.
Collective Artists Network runs Galleri5 natively on Azure, leveraging Microsoft Foundry and cutting-edge AI tools to handle film, episodic and advertising workflows in a secure enterprise environment. Microsoft highlighted Collective as a “Frontier” organisation successfully moving AI from pilot projects to real production-scale deployment in cinema. The technology is also on display at Microsoft’s NAB booth in the West Hall (Booth W1731).
Jio Studios (Media & Content Business, Reliance Industries), president Jyoti Deshpande said the project advances the studio’s mission to take Indian stories global with scale, ambition and authenticity, “With Krishna, we are embracing cutting-edge AI-led filmmaking while democratising these tools to make them more accessible, intuitive and cost-effective for storytellers everywhere.”
Collective Artists Network founder & group CEO Vijay Subramaniam added, “We’re using technology developed in India to carry our culture and history to audiences worldwide at a scale never seen before.”
Microsoft, vice president for telco media & entertainment, gaming Silvia Candiani noted that the media industry has reached an inflection point, “AI is no longer about experimentation but delivering real impact at production scale… By building AI-native creative systems on Microsoft Azure, Collective exemplifies how storytellers can unlock new formats, move faster and realise a true return on intelligence while keeping human creativity at the centre.”
Krishna forms part of Historyverse, Collective Studios’ ambitious slate of history and culture-driven IPs. The slate draws from iconic figures and traditions that shaped the Indian subcontinent, including stories inspired by Kali, Karna and Durga. It builds on the already-released Mahabharat: Ek Dharmayudh series, showing how ancient narratives can be reimagined for modern screens.
Jio Studios, India’s leading content studio and the media and content arm of Reliance Industries, continues its blockbuster run. The studio’s Dhurandhar franchise led by Dhurandhar and Dhurandhar: The Revenge has become the first Indian film series to cross Rs 3,000 crore worldwide. It also delivered three consecutive years of India’s highest-grossing Hindi films: Stree 2 (2024), Dhurandhar (2025) and Dhurandhar: The Revenge (2026). In just eight years, Jio Studios has assembled a library of over 160 films and series, with more than 60 titles winning over 500 awards. Other notable successes include Laapataa Ladies (India’s official Oscar entry 2025), Stree, Article 370, Shaitaan and Mrs.
The NAB unveiling marks another step in Jio Studios and Collective’s push to blend Indian storytelling talent with frontier technology proving that the future of cinema may well be both ancient in spirit and thoroughly modern in execution. For audiences who love epic tales with a fresh twist, Krishna promises to deliver divine drama, this time with a little help from the cloud.
