Hindi
Goa film fest to showcase 200 films from 50 countries
NEW DELHI: The Fortieth International Film Festival of India in Goa next month will feature 200 films from about 50 countries and will for the first time award the best director as well.
There will be about 65 films from 45 countries in the Cinema of the World. The continent focus is on Africa and Latin America, while the country focus is on the cinema of Italy, France, Poland, Croatia and Estonia.
Films made by Indians abroad on NRI issues will be part of the ‘Film India worldwide’ section. Retrospectives in the foreign films category will include Gurinder Chadha of the United Kingdom, Manuel De Olievera of Portugal and Nonzee Nimibutr of Thailand. In addition, five anti-war films will also be shown.
IFFI 2009 will commence on 23 November at the Kala Academy in Panaji and run for 10 days till 3 December.
According to Festival Director S M Khan, “The best film award will be jointly shared by both the director and the producer of the film‘‘ and the winner gets the prestigious Golden Peacock award and Rs 4 million as cash prize. The Best Director and the winner of the Special Jury Award will get silver peacock and cash prizes of Rs 1.5 million each.
The Indian Panorama will showcase 47 films – 26 feature and 21 non-feature films. In addition, the National Film Archives of India, Pune, will screen five vintage musical hits and three National Film Award winning movies – Do Ankhen Baara Haath (1957), Sagar Sangame (1958) and Apur Sansar (1959).
Tributes to Indian film personalities include Neelu Phule, Prakash Mehra, Shakti Samanta, Feroz Khan, Leela Naidu among others. The Films Division, Mumbai, will show documentaries on Indian music and musicians including Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, Ustad Bismillah Khan, Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, Pandit Jasraj, Naushad, K L Saigal, Begum Akhtar and Mohammad Rafi.
The retrospectives in the Indian section will include films from Assam, as the Assamese Film Industry is celebrating the diamond jubilee. The films of Jahnu Barua, Bhabhendranath Saikia, Santwana Bardoloj and Sanjeev Hazarika will be showcased.
The retrospective will also feature films of those artistes who have completed 50 years in the film industry. Two movies each of Kamal Hassan, Asha Parekh and Saumitra Chatterjee will be screened.
Spoof Cinema, mocking popular cinema, is the new entrant in this edition of the festival. Films such as Malegaon ka Superman and Gabbarbhai MBBS are part of this package.
Among the parallel activities, Shiamak Davar will present a lecture demonstration on ‘Evolution of Dance in Hindi Cinema’ while Kishwar Desai will speak on ‘Hindi Films based on book adaptations.”
A total 1200 seats in Madgaon and another 100 in Kala Academy, Panaji, have been added for the Festival this year
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.
