The work of Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino will be celebrated at a Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival event.
The celebration will be hosted by Indian filmmakers Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti’s Tiger Baby.
Ahead of the event, Guadagnino will give a masterclass at the festival. The filmmaker will be presented with the festival’s Excellence in Cinema (International) Award by Chairperson Priyanka Chopra Jonas at the opening ceremony on 27 October. The festival will screen Guadagnino’s Oscar and BAFTA-nominated “I Am Love” (2009).
Guadagnino’s films include “A Bigger Splash” (2015), the Oscar-winning “Call Me By Your Name” (2017), “Suspiria” (2018) and the documentary “Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams” (2020). “Bones and All” (2022) won Guadagnino the Silver Lion for best director in Venice. He made his television debut with the HBO drama series “We Are Who We Are” (2020). His film “Challengers”, starring Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor, is due out in April 2024, and he is currently in post-production on his next feature film, based on William S. Burroughs’ novel “Queer”.
Festival director Anupama Chopra said: “Luca Guadagnino’s body of work is extraordinary. As we honour him with the Jio MAMI Excellence in Cinema Award this year, we’re delighted to host a celebration in his honour along with Tiger Baby. The gathering is an opportunity for South Asian talent to interact with him.”
Tiger Baby’s Gully Boy, directed by Akhtar and written by him, Kagti and Vijay Maurya, was selected for the 2019 Berlinale. This year’s Berlinale series featured Kagti and Akhtar’s Prime Video series “Dahaad,” which made its Indian debut on the platform. Season 2 of their Prime Video series “Made in Heaven” is a hit for the service.
Next up for the duo is Netflix’s The Archies, based on the popular comic books they wrote and Akhtar directed, which airs on December 7. They are also producing Namrata Rao’s “Angry Young Men”, a documentary about famous Bollywood screenwriters Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, who created Amitabh Bachchan’s “angry young man” persona in the 1970s; and Arjun Varain Singh’s friendship saga ‘Kho Gaye Hum Kahan’ starring Adarsh Gourav (‘The White Tiger’), Ananya Pandey (‘Dream Girl 2’) and Siddhant Chaturvedi (‘Gully Boy’).
The Tiger Baby team said: “We are so excited to be celebrating Luca Guadagnino. We are huge fans of his work and we’re not the only ones. There are many filmmakers like us in the industry who will now have the opportunity to interact with him and let him know that he is always welcome at Jio MAMI and in India.”
Guadagnino’s masterclass and event will take place on 29 October at Mumbai’s National Media Centre at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre. The festival runs until 5 November.
