18th Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival opens on 20th October

   

Konkona SenSharma's directorial debut A Death in the Gunj  will open 18th Jio MAMI  Mumbai Film Festival.The opening ceremony  will be held at Royal Opera House . Jury members  for India Gold and International

Competition headed by Turkish writer-director Reha Erdem and Portuguese writer-director Miguel Gomez  respectively .This festival will run from 20 to 27 October . Indian writer-director Sai Paranjpye and Chinese film-maker Jia Zhangke to be honoured with Excellence in Cinema awards.  Trailblazing film-maker Cary Fukunaga to conduct Masterclass at the Festival. The Jury composition is as follows:

International Competition Jury

Miguel Gomes, Head of Jury

Miguel Gomes studied cinema at the Lisbon Theatre and Film School. He worked as a film critic from 1996 to 2000. Subsequently, he directed several short films including the Oberhausen Short Film Festival winner Meanwhile (1999) before directing features such as The Face You Deserve (2004), Our Beloved Month Of August (2008), the Berlin FIPRESCI prize winner Tabu (2012) and Arabian Nights, a three-part feature film that premiered in the Directors Fortnight at Cannes in 2015.

Tala Hadid

Tala Hadid made her first docufeature, Sacred Poet on Pier Paolo Pasolini. Her films have screened at film festivals around the world, including Berlin and Venice and shown, among other venues, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Lincoln Center in New York, The Walker Arts Center, La Cinémathèque Française in Paris and the Photographer’s Gallery in London. Her films have received numerous awards, including a Student Academy Award in 2005 for Tes Cheveux Noirs Ihsan. In 2015, Hadid's latest project, House in the Fields, was selected to screen as a work-in-progress at the 72nd Venice Film Festival, where it was awarded two prizes.

Anurag Kashyap

Anurag Kashyap is an Indian film writer, director and producer. Kashyap got his major break as a co-writer in Ram Gopal Varma's crime drama Satya (1998), and made his directorial debut with Paanch (2003). He has won six Filmfare awards for his films Udaan (2010), Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), Queen (2013). Among his other notable films are Dev D (2009), a modern adaptation of Devdas, the thriller That Girl in Yellow Boots (2011), the two-part crime drama Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), Murabba one of the short films in Bombay Talkies (2013), Ugly (2014) and Bombay Velvet (2015). In 2013, he was awarded the Chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) at a ceremony during the Cannes Film Festival. He is the founder of the film production company Anurag Kashyap Films, and co-founder of Phantom Films.

Chris McDonald

Chris McDonald is President of Hot Docs, North America’s largest documentary film festival and market. Hot Docs’ mandate is to advance and celebrate the art of documentary, and to provide support to doc-filmmakers. The festival has raised over $100 million in production financing for filmmakers, and attracted an audience of over 211,000 in 2016, along with 2500+ international delegates. In addition to having raised over $8 million in production funds for filmmakers, Hot Docs opened one of the world’s first year-round doc-focussed cinemas in 2012. The Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema in Toronto has attracted over 700,000 filmgoers since then.

Christine Vachon

Christine Vachon is an Independent Spirit Award and Gotham Award winner, who co-founded the production house Killer Films with partner Pamela Koffler in 1995. Over the past decade and a half, the two have produced some of the most celebrated American indie features, including Carol (2015, nominated for six Academy Awards), Far from Heaven (2002, nominated for four Academy Awards), Still Alice (2014, Academy Award winner), Boys Don’t Cry (1999, Academy Award winner), One Hour Photo (2002), Kids (1995), Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2004), Happiness (1998), Velvet Goldmine (1998), Safe (1995), I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), Camp (2003), Swoon (1992) and I’m Not There (2007, Academy Award nominated). In television, Vachon recently executive-produced the Emmy and Golden Globe winning miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011) for HBO and Z, an upcoming series on Amazon based on the life of Zelda Fitzgerald. Her other recent works include Kill Your Darlings (2015), Goat (2016), and Wiener-Dog (2016).

India Gold Jury

Reha Erdem

Head of Jury

Born in Istanbul, Reha Erdem graduated from the Cinema Department of Paris 8 University. He obtained his M.A. in Plastic Arts at the same University. He made his first feature-length film, Oh Moon in 1989, as a French-Turkish co-production. He made Run for Money in 1999, Mommy, I’m Scared in 2004, Times and Winds in 2006, My Only Sunshine, Turkish-Greek-Bulgarian co-production, in 2008, Kosmos in 2009. Jin (2012) and Singing Women (2013) are Turkish-French-German co-productions. His latest film, Big Big World (2016) has won the Special Jury Prize in the Orizzonti Section of the Venice Film Festival. 

Mychael Danna

Mychael Danna is an Academy Award-winning film composer recognized for his evocative blending of non-western traditions with orchestral and electronic music. He won the 2013 Oscar and Golden Globe for his score for Ang Lee’s Life of Pi and has composed many award-winning scores for his long-time collaborator, Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter, 1997), Exotica (1994)). His other noted credits include films such as Monsoon Wedding (2001), Antwone Fisher (2002), Being Julia (2004), Capote (2005), Water (2005), Little Miss Sunshine (2006), Surf’s Up (2007), 500 Days of Summer (2008), The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), Moneyball (2011), Sanjay’s Super Team (2015) and The Good Dinosaur (2015). Danna's recent films include Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016) and Storks (2016).

Yonfan

Yonfan started out as a renowned photographer and was noted for his celebrity portraits, before he made the transition to filmmaking. He began making films in the late ‘80s and till date has directed thirteen films including A Certain Romance (1984), Story of Rose (1985), Bugis Street (1995), Bishonen (1998), Peony Pavilion (2001) and Prince of Tears (2009). He has also been on the juries of the film festivals at Busan and Sydney.

Tomasz Wasilewski

Tomasz Wasilewski is a Polish film director and screenwriter. His 2016 film United States of Love was shown at the 66^th Berlin International Film Festival where he won the Silver Bear for Best Script. He is considered the most interesting voice in the young Polish directing scene and is already considered a promising representative of European auteur cinema. He is characterized by a minimalistic style. His movies are built from psychological portraits created with precision and sensitiveness.

Stephanie Zacharek

Stephanie Zacharek is the film critic for Time Magazine. She has previously worked with Boston Phoenix and was the chief film critic for Salon.com and the Village Voice. A graduate of Syracuse University, New York, Zacharek’s writings on books and pop culture have also appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone and Sight and Sound. In 2010, as a part of the Berlinale Talent Campus, Zacharek participated on the panel ‘Fear Eats the Soul: The State of Film Criticism’. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics and was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in criticism.