Hindi
Mumbai Film Festival to kick off on 29 October
MUMBAI: The 11th Mumbai Film Festival (MFF), organised by Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI), is scheduled to take place from 29 October to 5 November in Mumbai.
A Reliance Big Entertainment initiative, MMF has the distinction of being the only international film festival in India to be organised by an independent body of practicing film professionals.
A five-member international jury will include celebrated Hollywood scriptwriter, director and Martin Scorsese‘s long term collaborator Paul Schrader, scriptwriter of Taxi Driver and co-writer of Raging Bull amongst others, and eminent Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, a Golden Lion awardee at the Venice Film Festival and the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.
This year MFF will honour two talented filmmakers from India and abroad. Shashi Kapoor will receive the Indian lifetime achievement award at the inaugural function of the Festival on 29 October while Greek filmmaker Angelopoulos will be presented the international lifetime achievement award in the closing ceremony of the Festival on 5 November.
A retrospective of Angelopoulos‘ films will be organised to salute the maestro. Considered one of the greatest living directors, Angelopoulos has won awards at all major International film festivals.
Divided into five sections (International Competition for the First Feature Films of Directors, World Cinema, Indian Showcase, Dimensions Mumbai and Retrospectives), the Festival offers something to every film buff.
“The festival will showcase the best in contemporary Indian cinema even while it takes a look back at cinema down the ages,” notes renowned film-maker Shyam Benegal, the chair-person of MAMI.
“We also want to encourage young film talent and have a forum for that. Further, our audience will be treated to the works of Shashi Kapoor and Angeloupolous, two film-makers to be honoured with life-time achievement awards. Both have traversed a long path and made a distinctive niche for themselves in world cinema,” he adds.
The 11th MFF will also organise a exhibition to commemorate and celebrate 60 years of Dev Anand‘s Navketan Films. A retrospective from Navketan will be screened to mark the occasion.
Fun Republic, the four-screen multiplex, will be the central venue of the 11th MFF while films taking part in the festival will also be screened at Metro BIG Cinema and other theatres.
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.
