No Khans for Cannes, but Bollywood to rock

Bollywood stars always spice up the red carpet but their movies seldom create a serious buzz.

But this time alternative Bollywood takes an upper hand from commercial song-and-dance drama.

Well-known dancer and choreographer, the late Uday Shankar’s directorial debut 'Kalpana' has been chosen for screening at the Cannes Classics 2012 programme.

'Kalpana' will be screened as part of the World Cinema Foundation, created in Cannes in 2007 by filmmaker Martin Scorsese and many filmmakers in order to restore world treasures. Featuring Shankar and his wife Amala, the film has been restored by the World Cinema Foundation from a copy of the original negative preserved by the National Film Archive of India.

Anurag Kashyap, has a hand in three of the productions showing at Cannes. Kashyap’s 'Peddlers' will be showcased at Cannes Critics’ Week and compete for the prestigious Camera d’Or, while both parts of his 'Gangs Of Wasseypur' will be screened as part of non-competitive section – Director’s Fortnight.

Another film from India will be Ashim Ahluwalia’s 'Miss Lovely'. It will be screened in the non-competitive, Uncertain Regard section of the festival.

Anurag Kashyap directed the longest-running entry in the festival, "Gangs of Wasseypur", a five hour and 20 minute film he describes as "a Bollywood-influenced gangster epic, part Western, part documentary."

With a folk-meets-dubstep soundtrack and a basis in true stories, the film follows three generations of coal and scrap-trade mafia gangs in a suburb in east India who are obsessed with traditional Hindi cinema.

"These people grow up wanting to be gangsters, they don't go to school or colleges, they watch Bollywood," he told AFP. "Everyone has a false sense of film screen heroism that they follow."

"Mainstream Bollywood has always been there and it caters to people who need it, but the other kind of cinema is almost absent," he said.

The mainstream itself is starting to grapple with broader content, but the fact it operates in a movie-mad country of 1.2 billion people could be to blame for the slow pace of change.

Like Kashyap, Ahluwalia distances himself from traditional Bollywood but has a fascination with elements of Indian cinema: his "very gritty and dark" film depicts the sleazy world of 1980s "C" grade Hindi movies.

"I was interested in the lower depths of the industry, people who make cheap films on the margins -- sex horror films, bandit films," he said.

The Cannes International Film Festival, said to attract 35,000 film professionals and over 4,000 international journalists every year, is to be held May 16-27, 2012.

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