Hindi
Dan Wolman and Nitin Kakkar get best film awards at first DIFF
NEW DELHI: Noted Israel filmmaker Dan Wolman’s Film ‘Valley of Strength‘ and Indian director Nitin Kakkar’s film ‘Filmistaan‘ were awarded as the Best Films at the first Delhi International Film Festival.
Renowned telecaster Shoib Ilyasi’s film ‘498-A Wedding Gift‘ on false cases relating to dowry and Nitin Tiwari’s ‘Rajula’ received the Best Audience Choice Awards.
Veteran actor and theatre artist Zohra Sehgal was awarded the Minar-E-Dilli award and thespian Sharmila Tagore was honoured with the Life Time Achievement Award for her immense contribution in films.
The best film under the NRI section went to Sangeeta Nambiyar‘s film ‘The Gran Plan‘ from Singapore and ‘Cinema for the People‘ won the award in the documentary section. Under animation section, Suraj Bashisht from India got an award for his film ‘Bravo‘. The Art section award went to Bharti Dixit for her paintings and to Harminder Singh for his unique sculptures.
A total of 174 films from 32 countries including at least twenty per cent from the SAARC countries were screened at the Festival. The best amongst selected films were honoured with the Golden Minar and Silver Minar awards respectively.
DIFF founder president and senior journalist Ram Kishore Parcha said the festival had been timed to coincide with 100 years of Indian cinema and a century of Delhi as the capital of India.
Parcha said there had been a vacuum of an international film festival since the International Film Festival of India was shifted to Goa, and there was also a need to have a filmmaking hub in north India. This festival fulfilled these needs.
There were as many as sixteen films from Pakistan with ‘Lamha‘ being the closing film. The Polish film ‘80 Million‘ by Waldemar Krzystek was the opening film.
Festival secretary K Goswami who is a filmmaker himself announced that a film library of DVDs of classics was being established at the Indian Media and Communication Centre in Gautam Nagar in south Delhi.
Classic Films from Overseas and India were included as special sections along with Delhi Scope section in the festival. Retrospective, Tributes and Homage sections included films of Dev Anand, Balraj Sahni and other legendary filmmakers and actors. This section also included films of Adoor Gopalakrishnan and the distinguished actor Soumitra Chatterjee from Bengal.
A special section called NRI Cinema had been included in the festival. Under this section at least 15 films by Non Resident Indians living in different parts of the world were showcased.
The organizations that partnered with the festival are Broadway International Film Festival, Los Angeles, South Cinema South Film Festival, and JMT from Israel, Slade school of fine arts, London, Film factory china, Turkish Film Industry, Cinetech Nationale Mexico, Brazil films, Media Box Bangladesh, Hunarkada from Pakistan, Film Boutique from Germany, Second largest Nantes film festival of France and French cultural centre.
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.
