Hollywood
Indian filmfest in Melbourne to become competitive from this year
NEW DELHI: The Indian Film Festival of Melbourne (IFFM) is becoming a competitive festival with international competition in 2014.
The festival, for which actor Vidya Balan is the brand ambassador, will take place from 1 to 11 May.
The inaugural Indian Film Festival Awards (IFFM Awards) will honour films in five categories: Best Film, Best Performance, Best Director, Best Independent Film and the People’s Choice Award.
A select number of narrative feature films will be invited into competition. The films will be judged by an International Jury of prominent Indian and Australian film industry figures from a wide range of backgrounds. The stellar list includes award-winning Australian director Phillip Noyce (Rabbit Proof Fence, Dead Calm, The Quiet American); world renowned Australian film editor Jill Bilcock (Strictly Ballroom, Elizabeth, Moulin Rouge, Red Dog and Shekhar Kapur’s upcoming Paani) and 2013 Gold Jury member for the Mumbai Film Festival and celebrated filmmaker Raju Hirani (Munnabhai MBBS , Lage rahoo Munna Bhai and 3 Idiots ) Indian actress, producer and television presenter Simi Garewal; film critic Rajeev Masand and Indian actress, director, writer and producer Suhasini Maniratnam. Winners of the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne Awards announced at the Festival.
Festival Director Mitu Bhowmick-Lange said in a release from Melbourne, “We are thrilled to announce the inaugural Indian Film Festival of Melbourne Awards. The Awards will build the festival’s reputation as an important international showcase for contemporary Indian cinema.”
Balan was a 2013 Cannes Jury Member and in January was awarded the Padma Shri, the fourth-highest civilian award given by the Indian government. Balan will be in Melbourne to launch the festival programme on March 28.
IFFM continues to offer a window into the future of filmmaking. The Western Union Short Film Competition is now open to filmmakers from India and Australia.
The Indian Film Festival of Melbourne was established in 2012 as an initiative of the Victorian Coalition Government and presents a broad, curated program of more than thirty films, ranging from Bollywood to art house and the sub continent, as well as master classes. In 2014, the festival presents a world-class program of films across three Melbourne cinemas.
Hollywood
Utopai Studios partners Huace to deploy PAI for long form content
Deal includes revenue sharing as Huace adopts AI engine across global ops
MUMBAI: Lights, camera… algorithm, the script just got a silicon co-writer. In a move that signals how storytelling itself is being re-engineered, U.S.-based Utopai Studios has partnered China’s Huace Film & TV Co. Ltd. to bring artificial general intelligence into the heart of long-form content creation.
At the centre of the deal is PAI, Utopai’s cinematic storytelling system, which Huace will deploy as a core engine across its production pipeline from development and creative iteration to global localisation. The partnership includes a large-scale annual usage commitment from Huace, alongside a usage-based revenue-sharing model, underscoring both ambition and commercial confidence on both sides.
For Huace, one of China’s largest film and television companies, the bet is not on automation alone but on scale with control. With distribution spanning over 200 countries and a presence across more than 20 international platforms, including Netflix and YouTube, the company brings a vast content ecosystem where even marginal efficiency gains can translate into significant output shifts. Its extensive TV IP library further positions it as fertile ground for AI-assisted storytelling workflows.
The choice of PAI follows what Huace described as a rigorous evaluation of existing AI tools, many of which remain limited to fragmented use cases such as video generation or editing. What tipped the scales, according to the company, was PAI’s ability to handle long-form narrative complexity maintaining continuity, structure, and creative coherence across entire story arcs rather than isolated clips.
Utopai, for its part, is using the partnership to anchor its international expansion strategy, pitching PAI as an enterprise-ready system built for customisation, privacy, and regulatory adaptability across markets. That positioning becomes particularly relevant as global media companies increasingly scrutinise how AI integrates into proprietary workflows.
The timing is notable. Earlier this month, Utopai upgraded PAI to support three-minute 4K video generation and advanced multi-shot sequencing features designed to tackle one of AI storytelling’s biggest hurdles: consistency across scenes.
What emerges is not just another tech collaboration, but a glimpse into how the grammar of filmmaking could evolve. Because if stories were once crafted frame by frame, the next chapter might just be coded scene by scene.
