The Last Lear premiere at Toronto film fest

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

The latest film by Rituparno Ghosh, The Last Lear, has been selected for a world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this year. It will be screened in the Roy Thomson Hall, the largest and the most attractive theatre in Toronto, on September 9. The festival has been featuring the best of world cinema for the past 32 years.

Starring Amitabh Bachchan, Preity Zinta, Arjun Rampal and Shefali Shah, the film is an adaptation of Utpal Dutt's theatrical masterpiece "Ajker Shahjahan". Besides being the first full-length English movie in his career, it is also the first time that Big B is portraying the character of an actor on screen. He has also penned some dialogues in the movie. Rituparno fondly called the superstar Amitda on the sets.

Producer Arindam Chaudhury also seems happy with the overall project, as well the direction. The Last Lear is the second movie, after "Dosar", which Arindam's Planman Motion Pictures (PMP) has done with Rituparno. Apart from critical acclaim at film festivals, executive producer and CEO of PMP, Shubho Shekhar Bhattacharjee, also expects The Last Lear to go down well with the general audience.

The forthcoming projects of PMP are "Rangeen", an adaptation of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" written and directed by Sharat Katariya, and "I'm 24", written and directed by Saurabh Shukla. Once the premiere of The Last Lear gets over at Toronto, PMP will plunge into post-production of Rituparno's Sunglass. Starring Jaya Bachchan, Madhavan, Konkona Sen Sharma, Naseeruddin Shah and Raima Sen, and with lyrics by Prasoon Joshi, the film seems worth the wait for the audience, too.