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Siraj Syed is the India Correspondent for FilmFestivals.com and a member of FIPRESCI, the International Federation of Film Critics. He is a Film Festival Correspondent since 1976, Film-critic since 1969 and a Feature-writer since 1970. He is also an acting and dialogue coach. @SirajHSyed
ConnecTechAsia 2019, 08: WarnerMedia chooses AsiaSat as strategic partner for HD channels distribution in Asia Pacific
Asia Satellite Telecommunications Company Limited (AsiaSat) has been selected by WarnerMedia as a strategic partner for distributing regional HD services of CNN International, Cartoon Network, Boomerang and Warner TV, as well as HBO HD in South Asia, via AsiaSat 7 in the Asia-Pacific.
AsiaSat has been distributing a total of five WarnerMedia SD channels on AsiaSat 7 (previou...
ConnecTechAsia 2019, 07: Hoods Inc. Productions Powers its New Modern Media Operation with EditShare
EditShare, a technology leader in intelligent scale-out storage, AQC and media management solutions, announced last month that Singapore-based Hoods Inc. Productions (Hoods Inc.) has designed its next-generation media operation around EditShare media solutions, putting XStream EFS scale-out shared storage, Flow production asset management and Ark archiving and backup at the core of its media p...
Shoplifters, Review: Only those cannot study at home need to go to school
Through many decades, albeit once in a while, a Japanese film comes up in the rich tradition of Frank Capra, Vittorio De Sica, Satyajit Ray, Ritwick Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, and the better films of Hrishikesh Mukherjee. Back in the 30s, 40s and 50s, in the days of Yasujirō Ozu and Mikio Naruse, it was called neo-realistic cinema. Most of these films were made with non-star casts, on shoe-string budgets, had realistic styles...
The Promise of Heaven, Play review: The buffoon as philosopher
Viagra in heaven, virgins, virgin-swapping, deflowered virgins re-virginating, really long-lasting erections, homosexuality, masturbation with a prop, sexually stimulating deodorants…what is this play about? (Kashmiri/IS) Suicide bombers. Yes, you read that right. But it is equally about all of the above, and in good measure. Having restricted entry to adults, writer-director Kamlesh Acharya has a field day playing with the...
Aarohi, Review: Play about decadence, women’s empowerment and good v/s evil
A Kinkini Production, Aarohi had its premiere show on Saturday, 29th June, at St. Andrew's Auditorium, Bandra, Mumbai. It is an ode to the classical Indian dance form of kathak and its exponents, weaved into a narrative that brings in other societal evils into focus, like the maltreatment of women, equality of all citizens and moral values, like truth and honesty.
During the 19th and 20th century, there was...
Amazon Prime Video launching all-new season of original series Comicstaan, unveils trailer
Comicstaan becomes the first Indian Amazon Original to launch a second season, which comes as part of Prime Day 2019 celebrations.
The first three episodes of the much-awaited second season of Comicstaan are set to release on July 12, 2019, followed by a weekly release, only on Prime Video.
Ace comedians like Zakir Khan, Neeti Palta and Season 1 host, Sumukhi Suresh, join veteran judges Biswa Kaylan R...
Noblemen, Review: Merchant of menace
Children in a classy public school are preparing a play for Founders’ Day, and the work chosen for the occasion is William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Our protagonist has been selected to play Bassanio, after an audition, and is waiting anxiously for the staging. His mother, a former Wing Commander, now confined to a wheel-chair, is likely to be cured in a short time, and hopes to attend her son’s big day, for the first time ever. O...
Article 15, Review: Beatings, gang-rapes, murder and other factual fiction
Part III, Fundamental Rights, Rights to Equity, Article 15, of the Indian Constitution, declares that, ‘The State shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them.’ It further proclaims that citizens too shall not discriminate against each other on these bases, and specifies the areas with regard to which there cannot be any discriminati...
ConnecTechAsia 2019, 02: Techtel to address key business drivers with global leaders at BroadcastAsia
Representing nine global industry leaders, Techtel will be showcasing a great number of broadcast technology innovations, with special emphasis on five key business drivers: Transition to IP-Based content delivery, Autonomous workflows, 4K Content Production, Unprecedented Low Cost Media Distribution and Integrated Newsrooms. This follows Techtel’s appointment of a new country manager,...
ConnnecTechAsia 2019, 06: NSSLGlobal to showcase its innovative maritime portfolio at CommunicAsia
Award-winning global satcom and IT solutions provider NSSLGlobal will be returning to CommunicAsia from 18th--20th June at the Marina Bay Sands, Singapore. The three-day event will see NSSLGlobal continuing its 50th anniversary celebrations and sharing its industry-leading connectivity and management IT solutions, engineered to enhance connectivity for maritime vessels across the globe.
NSSLG...
ConnecTechAsia 2019, 05: Revisiting the Marketing Mix in the Digital Age
The marketing mix of Price, Product, Place, and Promotion has evolved. While classic strategies are often still in play, digitisation has arrived to shake things up in the world of branding. The marketing mix as a concept still holds weight today because it is a series of actions that form a plan to drive revenue and growth. Despite business change, the 4 Ps still require keen scrutiny, market research and competitive an...
ConnecTechAsia 2019, 04: EditShare to Showcase Lineup of Media Workflow Solutions
EditShare, a technology leader in intelligent scale-out storage, media asset management (MAM) and automated quality control (AQC), will be displaying the sought-after solutions HelmutFX, a back-office solution that provides Adobe Premiere Pro CC projects and users management via EditShare Flow, and VBox, the next generation ‘Channel-in-a-Box’ playout automation system, at this year’s BroadcastA...
X Men-Dark Phoenix, Review: X-Men, ex X-Men and X-Women
Every fan knows that the X in X-Men is for Xavier, the teacher-trainer who runs a school for the differently abled (gifted with a power or force other humans do not possess). In Dark Phoenix, there is a lot of play on the ‘word’, if one may call it that, X-Men. There are X-Men, and there are ex X-Men, then there are women members of X-Men who tell Xavier disparagingly that he should consider changing the name to X-Women, in v...
ConnecTechAsia, 03: Eutelsat, KT Sat, NAGRA and Teledyne at ConnecTechASia, Singapore, June 18-20
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ConnecTechAsia 2019, 01: Singapore to host ConnecTechAsia during June 18-20
Bringing together BroadcastAsia, CommunicAsia and NXTAsia across two centrally located venues, the iconic Marina Bay Sands Exhibition Centre and the old favourite, SunTec Singapore, ConnecTechAsia showcases state-of-the-art communication, enterprise, broadcast technologies and innovations. Coupled with a supercharged agenda, with renowned speakers, at ConnecTechAsia Summit, and a host of experiential activities, Conne...
Anahita’s Law, Review: Parsee patriarchy, woes of women and law of the land
Discrimination against women, and children of mixed religion marriages, are not phenomena that stare us in the face, like some of the basic needs of mankind: food, clothing and shelter. It is not even a second tier priority, like electricity, roads and water are. In a country struggling to provide these amenities to its population of 1.6 bn, implementing the fundamental right to practice the religion of your cho...
Rocketman, Review: Messed-up multi-millionaire music-maestro
Film-makers now need to ask themselves whether it makes good sense to churn out bio-pics with regular frequency. Does the genre hold enough promise to deliver quality cinema? In recent times, many of them are guilty of picking eminent personalities from films and music, with common traits, like troubled childhood, inability to handle fame and fortune, sexual mania or alternative sexual behaviour, and drug abuse. The phenomenon is co...
Naughty Gang, Review: Gang apes
We keep hearing at every seminar or conference that with the advances in technology, anybody, just anybody, can make a film. In various Indian film schools too, film-making has been so vehemently de-mystified that every year some 10,000 students pass out and are ready to shoot from the hip, the hip being where they keep their mobile phones. It is a no contest. If a 22-23 year-old fresher can make films, why can’t those who have been around on the fringes,...
Nakkash/The Craftsman, Review: Balancing Dharma with Karma
Carving is a fine art that is dying, like many other man-made enterprises, what with mechanisation and changing tastes. One can see many shops along the Bandra-Mahim Causeway in Mumbai run by hand-carvers, who sell exquisite furniture. And if you take the film Nakkash, described as fiction, to represent the state of this dying art in the holy city of Banaras-Kashi (Varanasi), even the last expert who carved many a mandir (Hindu temple...
Ahaa Re (The Two Lovers/Oh, Look at You), Review: Castle of love on bedrock of food
When you want to make a film about love, lost and found, romance, sublime and selfless, it is a good idea not to include components like villains, fights, item songs, crude comedy, sexual overtones and foul language. So what do you fill your screenplay with? How about conflicts and disparities, of many hues and various proportions? And food? Yes, food. Well if you are a foodie, and a romantic foodie, then why ...
Life in Metaphors-Portraits of Girish Kasaravalli, by O.P. Srivastava: Well framed!
A banker with a passion of cinema, Om Prakash Srivastava hung up his ATM to pursue his dream. In 2012, he attended a course in Film Appreciation at Goa, organised by the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), where an ex alumnus and India’s most decorated film-maker, Girish Kasaravalli was taking a master class on film-making. OP was so impressed with the demeanour and erudition of his teacher an...
Brightburn, Review: Stay non-aliened
Comic-book creators took Moses as inspiration and wrote out a character called Superman, who arrives on earth as a baby, in a spaceship, from a planet called Krypton, is adopted by a childless couple, shows super powers and grows up to save the world from crisis after crisis. Soon, Superboy, who grew up to be Superman, became an on screen superhero, and a cult figure from the DC comics stable. He even joined hands with other superheroes on occasion and ba...
Yeh Hai India, Review: NREye
Indians settled abroad are called Non-Resident Indians, or NRIs. Not surprisingly, many of them still nurse feelings of love for the land of their birth, or of their fathers, and the often feel guilty pangs of separation from their motherland. Actor-producer-writer-director Manoj Kumar (real name Harikishen Goswami) made some hard hitting and box-office shattering patriotic films in the 60s and 70s, right till the early 80s, that earned him the epithet of Mr. Bhar...
Aladdin, Review: Aladdindeed
Believe it or not, Aladdin is a one-in-a-thousand-and-one story, part of The Thousand and One Nights (also called The Arabian Nights), stories narrated by a queen called Scheherazade, at bedtime, without revealing the end, to save herself from being killed by her husband, the murderous sadist who kills all his wives the day after he marries each one of them. Disney made an animated version in 1992, and here comes their live action CGI, musical avatar, directed and...
India’s Most Wanted, Review: Mission without ammunition, found wanting
Indian spy thrillers have been on the scene ever since the first film of James from Thames was released in India in the early 1960s. They were broadly divided into categories: rip-offs of 007 and C grade thrillers, with action and a bit of titillation. Remarkably, some of them even managed to incorporate catchy songs into the narrative. In the last two decades, after international terrorism, other than the eternal bo...
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About Siraj Syed
 Syed Siraj
(Siraj Associates)
Siraj Syed is a film-critic since 1970 and a Former President of the Freelance Film Journalists' Combine of India.
He is the India Correspondent of FilmFestivals.com and a member of FIPRESCI, the international Federation of Film Critics, Munich, Germany
Siraj Syed has contributed over 1,015 articles on cinema, international film festivals, conventions, exhibitions, etc., most recently, at IFFI (Goa), MIFF (Mumbai), MFF/MAMI (Mumbai) and CommunicAsia (Singapore). He often edits film festival daily bulletins.
He is also an actor and a dubbing artiste. Further, he has been teaching media, acting and dubbing at over 30 institutes in India and Singapore, since 1984.
Bandra West, Mumbai India View my profileSend me a message
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