Saat Din, shoot begins

The wait is over. Dawn Films and IMGC’s first feature film Saat Din Mohabbat In got off the ground last week. The cast of the film rehearsed the whole month of July after which the project finally went on-floor.

Penned by Fasih Bari Khan and helmed by Farjad Nabi and Meenu Gaur, SDMI, which is slated to be released in 2018, follows the journey of a young man trying to find true love in a crowded Karachi neighbourhood.

The stellar cast of the film includes Mahira Khan, Sheheryar Munawar, Adnan Shah Tipu, Amna Ilyas and Mira Sethi. Cool! They say, well begun is half-done.

Not my twins

No sir, you don’t want to mess with George Clooney. Early in the month of June, the Hollywood A-lister and his gorgeous wife Amal Alamuddin had twins — Ella and Alexander — but no section of the media was allowed to take the babies’ pictures.

Recently, the French magazine Voici published pictures of the actor holding one of the kids and his wife cradling the other near their palatial home in Italy. This upset George C a great deal and he now intends to take the publication and its team to court. In a [furious] statement he said, “Over the last week photographers from Voici magazine scaled our fence, climbed our tree and illegally took pictures of our infants inside our home. Make no mistake, the photographers, the agency and the magazine will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The safety of our children demands it.” The magazine’s management responded by reasoning that the couple has been “very public personalities” for the last few years, and the birth of their twins has also been commented on a lot. Their images published in the magazine were “a response to a public demand”. Hmm… let’s see whose demand takes precedence in the court of law.

The general in his labyrinth

Filmmaker Mohammed Naqvi’s Lal Masjid documentary Among the Believers has recently been nominated for an Emmy. Ironically, the film cannot be screened in Pakistan (It is, however, available on Netflix).

Now Naqvi’s latest documentary Insha’Allah Democracy, which received its world premiere last month at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival, is doing the festival rounds and gearing up for a commercial release later this year. The new film is about General Musharraf, and offers an “intimate look into the fallen leader’s life in exile and his failed attempt at a political comeback.”

Naqvi claims to have had unparalleled access to the former president over five years and has some “never-before-seen” footage in the film as well. Now that sounds interesting in a never-before way.

For the love of rickshaw

So, elitism doesn’t exist in Bollywood. Mmm … it kinda does. We are aware that Ileana D’Cruz is an amiable girl, and usually when she makes a comment about something it lacks veneer and comes right from her heart.

However, her recent wish published in an Indian newspaper, that she would like to travel by a rickshaw and explore Delhi’s famous middleclass bazaar Chandni Chowk, sounds a trifle patronising. She’s lived in India all her life and has never been to the chowk or ridden a rickshaw? Sounds hard to believe. Oh, perhaps she meant a CNG rickshaw. You know, those petrol-run ones make awful noises and cause all sorts of pollution.

Happy birthday

One doesn’t need to confirm that Sushant Singh Rajput and Kriti Sanon are dating. If someone insists that their PDA (public displays of affection, for the uninitiated) is just a publicity gimmick, then this nugget of info might suffice.

On July 27, the petite and elegant Kriti S turned 27. The gal’s latest acting assignment is Bareilly Ki Barfi. Just a day prior to her birthday, Sushant SR, who was in America, landed in Mumbai and the next day threw her a party at his Mumbai residence. He only invited a handful of people to the B-bash. Insiders say he wasn’t supposed to return from the US — where he was on a preparatory visit for his next film project — that soon. But he did … because, they’re an item.

Daddy Salman

Some of us might say they saw it coming. The child-adopting trend among actors is becoming as common as power outages in Pakistan.

After Sunny Leone, Salman Khan has now decided to adopt a kid. Well, not decided, but sorta echoed his family’s (read: his father Salim Khan’s) wish for him. What’s for sure is that he has begun to entertain the idea. Good luck Sallu mian! At your age, perhaps you will need more than one child to feel like a true daddy.

Published in Dawn, ICON, August 6th, 2017