PIFF the Magic Dragon

After a long time, and after a longish period of lockdown suffocation, the 3rd edition of the Pakistan International Film Festival (PIFF), held at Karachi’s Frere Hall, came as a pleasant and refreshing change. This edition was dedicated to women. Although, for reasons related to the pandemic, the organisers were unable to screen any films, the discussions, based on the present and future of Pakistani movies, along with keynote speeches by federal and provincial ministers, proved to be pretty thought-provoking. It also gave a chance to showbiz celebs to get together, following health protocols, and interact with each other. We hope things will move beyond the chit-chatting bit for the betterment of our entertainment industry.

National Awards

The Arts Council of Pakistan, Karachi, with the support of the Federal Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, will host the country’s first national film and TV awards. This was announced recently by the Council’s President Ahmed Shah. He said that while TV channels have their own award shows for their home-made or home-financed productions, the country needs an unbiased, all encompassing event that can, on a yearly basis, award Pakistan’s best films and TV plays with an impartial jury. This is interesting, because the Pakistan National Council of the Arts in Islamabad has actually been planning a national film awards as well. Is the federal information ministry unaware?

Xulfi It Is

Congratulations to Zulfiqar Ali Khan, aka Xulfi, who has replaced Rohail Hyatt as the producer of Coke Studio. He is a man with oodles of musical talent, proof of which is his spectacular work with Nescafe Basement. It’s true that his name as CS head has created quite a bit of excitement among music lovers, but he needs to be wary of the fact that Rohail H has set a pretty high bar for the show. Indeed, Xulfi is capable of going a notch up or two. Still, he will need to strike a balance between experimentation and tradition.

Judgmental
Peeps

Bollywood starlet Sara Ali Khan is young, talented and opinionated. If you criticise her work, she will defend it tooth and nail. Take, for example, the reception of her last film Coolie No 1, which was released on a streaming platform because of Covid-19 and was met with scathing reviews, not just from critics but from those who use Twitter. Talking to a news outlet, the actress has said that the movie merited multiplex screenings and that “twitterati cannot judge a film like Coolie No 1.” Okay. But what if they’d liked it?

Monica’s Advice

On June 18, thousands of HBO Max subscribers woke up to a blank email in their inboxes from the channel with “Integration Test 1” written in the subject column. It turned out that it was a mistake by an intern who sent the mail to all of them. Subsequently, HBO apologised for the “inconvenience”. It prompted a host of messages in support of the intern on social media, one of which came from none other than Monica Lewinsky. She wrote, “Dear intern, it gets better. Please don’t wear a beret for a while, okay?” In case you are wondering about the headgear reference, well, she was seen wearing a beret in some pictures when her scandal with Bill Clinton was exposed, after which it became a “Halloween costume choice” for many women. Hmmm… and don’t even go near cigars, dear intern.

For Love and Passport

An article recently suggested that Hugh Grant married his wife Anna Eberstein, a Swedish TV producer, in 2018 because of “passport reasons”. The background of the claim was an interview the actor gave at the time he was getting married to her (they already had three children). He had said that he and his partner think of marriage as a “pretty preposterous social construct” but “when you’ve got three children, it’s a nice thing to do… I didn’t like going through immigration into countries where they’d say, ‘Everyone with a Grant passport, over here, and all the others through there’.” Now after the above-mentioned article went viral, Hugh G tweeted, “No, I married my wife because I love her.” Chill sir, you are too old to worry about why you got hitched. Not just that, it’s preposterous.

Published in Dawn, ICON, June 27th, 2021