Mumbai Festival to Honor Monica Bellucci

The Mumbai film festival will honor Italian actress Monica Bellucci with a special award. The festival will screen “On The Milky Road” and “Irreversible” as part of a retrospective.

The 19th edition of the festival will open with Anurag Kashyap’s “The Brawler.” The film premiered at Toronto and will play at the London and Busan fests.

The films in the international competition for debutant directors are all in the middle of their global festival runs. They include three that bowed at Cannes – Rungano Nyoni’s “I’m Not a Witch,” Leonor Serraille’s “Montparnasse Bienvenue” and Atsuko Hirayanagi’s “Oh Lucy!”; two that opened at Sundance – John Trengrove’s “The Wound,” and Jonathan Olshefski’s “Quest”; two that bowed at SXSW – Ana Asensio’s “Most Beautiful Island,” and Samir Oliveros’ “Bad Luck Goat”; and Dan Kokotajlo’s “Apostasy” that bowed at Toronto; Onur Seylak’s “Daha” at Karlovy Vary; Ana Urushadze’s “Scary Mother” at Locarno; and Carla Simon’s “Summer 1993” at Berlin.

“Miss Sloane” director, John Madden will head the competition jury, with Indian actor/director Konkona Sen Sharma, Mexican cinematographer Alexis Zabe, Hong Kong-American actress Celina Jade (“Wolf Warrior 2”) and Argentinian writer-director Santiago Mitre (“The Summit”).

The India Gold competition section has four films that will world premiere at Busan – Devashish Makhija’s “Ajji,” Dipesh Jain’s “In The Shadows,” Pushpendra Singh’s “Ashwatthama,” and Shlok Sharma’s “Zoo.” Other titles include Rahul Jain’s Sundance winner “Machines,” Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s Rotterdam winner “Sexy Durga,” Karma Takapa’s Karlovy Vary nominated “Ralang Road,” Rima Das’ Toronto selection “Village Rockstars,” Miransha Naik’s Hong Kong selection “Juze,” Anushka Meenakshi and Iswar Srikumar’s “Up Down and Sideways,” and the Ektara Collective’s “Checkmate.”

The festival’s title sponsor is billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio Infocomm, and the associate sponsor is 21st Century Fox’s Star television network. The total prize money across categories is $172,000. The festival runs Oct. 12-18.

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