The Young India

Kartikey Sehgal

This is the working/first poster of ‘Vide’, a forthcoming film in English. The film is about the life of a church musician.

Participants include Manoj G Nigli as director, Kartikey Sehgal as actor and Christopher Masand as music director.

We wish for its sucessful completion.

To sum up this note:

“The future is no more uncertain than the present.“ – said Walt Whitman…

but added that, “The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light …

Kartikey Sehgal

The facets of Ganapati Visarjan. From ‘Langars’ to street dances to immersion.

[Link to Video]

[Link to Video]

Kartikey Sehgal

A collection of moving photographs from my recent visit to Kolkota. The audio has been edited to bring out the varied sounds of the city. The background music is set principally in Raga Khamaj. Click to Watch.

Kartikey Sehgal
(written for print media)

Festivals are opportunities to meet and discus shared interests and the success of any film festival should be measured by the discussions it provokes among the audience. The ongoing MAMI (Mumbai Academy of Moving Image) film festival offers hardly any scope for the participating audience to meet and comfortably discuss the films. So much so that the Mumbai Young Critics’ Special Jury, organised by the management to promote youngsters to watch international films, seems like a lost …

Santa Singh

One
Have a look at this lady [photo top: right]. She has acted in renowned and mostly-art-house filmmaker Shyam Benegal’s ‘Well Done Abba’. You would say that she is in the movie because she is pretty, graceful or beautiful. But then you learn that she has had a nose surgery done to rectify the nose that Mr. God gave her. While there may be something or nothing wrong in that (I find her pretty), it means that she does not consider herself as …

Kartikey Sehgal
Part One
Part Two

Another theatre writer, Vikram Kapadia, whose play is undergoing adaptation for film, thinks that “there is no fixed formula as to what makes a film work”.

Vikram’s play ‘Black With Equal’ is a black comedy in English about the trials and tribulations of a housing society and has been staged more than a hundred times.

Like Aatish, he is comfortable with placing an item song in the film but his concern is avoiding the ‘dumbing down’ ‘of content. He …

Kartikey Sehgal
Role of songs in a film’s success and a filmmaker talking about his film losing out to an item song and marketing.
Part One here.

…continued
But Sanjay feels that though an item number does not define a film, “there is at least a chance that more people will go to theatres. Because of the item song and any marketing ploy, the film is not going to lose out on audience”.

This logic, however, does not justify why the film ‘Summer 2007’, directed …

Kartikey Sehgal

Written first for DNA

Director Shyam Benegal, who has captured myriad expressions of life in his various films, had to free himself from the clutches of the item-number when he was making ‘Welcome to Sajjanpur’.

“He did not want to include songs in the film. He did so on the behest of the producers”, says writer Atul Tiwari who has worked with the director.

In one of the songs, that was probably required to be the item song of the film, a village …

Kartikey Sehgal

Not the camera but the actors move aplenty and intone and tell us about the epic victory of theatre actors over film actors.

You’d imagine that the director had fun making this movie. Then you’d read about his hardships and how he had to mortgage or sell property to obtain some money. Then you’d think that this was a difficult movie to make, full of sacrifices. But let me tell you, the director had fun and so did the actors. You see it …

Kartikey Sehgal

Despite the presence of several journalists at the recently concluded Mumbai Film Festival (MAMI ) certain ‘disturbances’ have not been brought out well in the newspapers.
Since it is being talked about for its ‘seventy percent growth in delegate registration’, the behaviour of the delegates (more like a representative than a common movie watcher) must be brought out publically too.

For instance, Iranian director Saman Estereki came to the premiere of his film ‘Empty Chair’ with big and seemingly heavy bags on his …