Hindi
Ang Lee’s Life of Pi will open New York film fest
MUMBAI: Ang Lee‘s big-screen adaptation of the bestselling Yann Martel novel Life of Pi 3D will open the New York film festival next month. The screening on 28 September, which raises the curtain on the festival‘s 50th edition, should help position Life of Pi for an awards season run.
Martel‘s 2002 Man Booker prize-winning novel chronicles the travails of a shipwrecked teenage boy stuck on a life raft with only a female orangutan, an injured zebra, a hungry hyena and a brooding Bengal tiger for company. Suraj Sharma, a 17-year-old student from Delhi, takes the lead role in the film adaptation after beating more than 3,000 other challengers to the role last year.
Lee, who opened the festival in 1997, with The Ice Storm, joins Robert Altman, Pedro Almodóvar and François Truffaut in the rank of filmmakers who opened the festival at least twice.
“Life of Pi is a perfect combination of technological innovation and a strong artistic vision. Ang Lee has managed to make a deeply moving, engrossing work that will delight audiences as much as it will astonish them. We‘re enormously proud to have this film for our opening night for the 50th NYFF,” said Richard Pe?a of The Film Society of Lincoln Center, the festival‘s organising body.
This year‘s New York film festival will run from 28 September to 14 October.
Hindi
Jio Studios, Sanjay Dutt team up to revive Khal Nayak
Rights acquired for new version, format under wraps as remake plans take shape.
MUMBAI: The villain is back and this time, he’s rewriting his own script. Jio Studios has partnered with Three Dimension Motion Pictures and Aspect Entertainment to revive the 1993 cult classic Khal Nayak, marking a fresh chapter for one of Bollywood’s most iconic anti-hero stories. The original film, directed by Subhash Ghai under Mukta Arts, was a commercial and cultural milestone, with Sanjay Dutt’s portrayal of Ballu becoming one of Hindi cinema’s most memorable performances.
Dutt, along with Aksha Kamboj, has now acquired the rights from the original creators, bringing on board Jio Studios and its President Jyoti Deshpande to steer the project creatively.
While the exact format whether remake, sequel, prequel, or a completely new narrative remains undisclosed, the collaboration aims to reinterpret the story for contemporary audiences while retaining the essence that made the original a defining film of the 1990s.
The move taps into a broader industry trend of reviving legacy intellectual property, particularly characters with strong recall value. “Khal Nayak” was notable for pushing mainstream Hindi cinema into morally grey territory at a time when heroes were largely one-dimensional, making Ballu’s character a standout.
The project also marks the film production debut of Aspect Entertainment, signalling a push towards more technology-led storytelling frameworks. Meanwhile, Jio Studios continues to expand its slate, having built a library of over 200 films and series, with more than 60 titles collectively winning 500-plus awards.
For Dutt, the revival is as much personal as it is strategic, a return to a role that reshaped his career. For the industry, it is another sign that nostalgia, when paired with scale, remains a powerful box-office proposition.
Because in Bollywood, some villains never fade, they just wait for the perfect comeback.
