Emile Hirsch & India Eisley Join Feature ‘Degenerate’

Roti, the Scottish-Indian restaurant which mashes up Scots and Indian cuisine with its unique fusion menu, is heading to Urmston. It’ll be setting up shop on Flixton Road, bringing with it its haggis pakoras and signature Irn-Bru Negroni.

Naman Ramachandran Netflix’s “Sacred Games,” Prime Video’s “Mirzapur” and SonyLIV’s “Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story” are the top three shows among the 50 all-time most popular Indian streaming series on Amazon’s online film database IMDb. The rankings are determined by the page views of IMDb customers in India between Jan. 1, 2018 to May 10, 2023. The list has representation from 12 platforms including Amazon’s Prime Video and miniTV, Netflix, SonyLIV, Disney+ Hotstar, YouTube, ZEE5, Voot, MX Player, JioCinema, TVF Play and ALTT. Crime drama is the most popular genre represented on the list, occupying 30 out of 50 slots, including the top four positions — “Sacred Games,” “Mirzapur,” “Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story” and “The Family Man.” Pankaj Tripathi played prominent roles in three out of the top 10 series on the list — “Sacred Games,” “Mirzapur” and “Criminal Justice.” Four shows released in 2023 — “Farzi,” “Taaza Khabar,” “The Night Manager” and “Rana Naidu” — made the most popular list.

Several people have died and a further 100 are seriously hurt after three trains collided in India.

Good afternoon Insiders, Max Goldbart here bringing you a rundown of all the biggest headlines and analysis from the international film and TV universe. Read on. 

EXCLUSIVE: With the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike entering its second month in the U.S., writers and filmmakers around the world are taking note of how these issues play out in their own countries.

India Amarteifio and Corey Mylchreest reunited on the red carpet!

EXCLUSIVE: Indian mega-star Ranveer Singh has signed for representation with WME in all areas globally.

Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) has unveiled the major competition selections for its 25th edition (June 9-18), which will be the first to be held in a fully physical format with international guests since before the pandemic. 

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief NBCUniversal (NBCU) and JioCinema, Viacom18’s streaming service, have entered into a multi-year partnership bringing thousands of hours of NBCU films and TV series to India. Content is sourced from the Universal Television, UCP, Universal International Studios, Universal Television Alternative Studio, Sky Studios, DreamWorks Animation, Universal Pictures, Focus Features and Bravo brands. NBCU’s programming will live in a Peacock branded hub starting next month on JioCinema’s newly announced “JioCinema Premium” SVOD tier. While JioCinema has been making an audience impact with free-of-charge screenings of the ongoing IPL cricket tournament, the first content announced on the subscription tier hailed from another recent deal with Warner Bros Discovery.

NBCUniversal has entered into a partnership with Indian streaming service JioCinema, owned by Viacom18, bringing thousands of hours of NBCU films and series to India. 

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The U.K.’s London Indian Film Festival and Birmingham Indian Film Festival will work together to present a two-city, two-part panoply of feature and short films, kicking off next month with “The Storyteller.” Directed by Ananth Mahadevan, “The Storyteller” sees Adil Hussain play a Gujarati businessman who believes that once physical wealth is accumulated, happiness will follow, but this proves not to be the case. Paresh Rawal plays the titular storyteller. The film is based on a story by the late, great Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray and contrasts the pursuit of material wealth with that of intellectual knowledge. Hussain, co-star Tannishtha Chatterjee and Mahadevan are expected to be on hand for Q&A sessions on June 22 at BFI Southbank and on June 23 at MAC Birmingham.

Beyoncé recently arrived in Sunderland as she continues on the UK leg of her sold-out Renaissance tour, and has treated her entourage to an Indian takeaway from Tyne and Wear's Bombay Barn.The meal receipt, which was shared by the restaurant on Facebook, shows that the Single Ladies singer ordered a curry tapas box - which included chicken massala, lamb curry, chicken bhuna, a vegetable bhaji, pilau rice and Indian chunky chips.The tapas box, which cost £24.99, was ordered alongside a 12-inch smashed burger pizza for £16.47, which was upgraded to stuffed crust for £2.50. Sharing a snap of the receipt to their Facebook page, Bombay Barn shared their excitement at their A-list clientele.

One of the most enchanting elements of visiting a new part of the world is experiencing the local cuisine. Bold and beautiful flavours that tell a story, and awaken our senses as we indulge them in an authentic setting - there's nothing quite like it.

Historical feature film Lioness, starring Aditi Rao Hydari (Jubilee) and Paige Sandhu (Emmerdale), has been set as the first official India-UK co-production under a treaty signed in 2008. 

Whether it’s a plate of hearty lamb curry or a scoop of fresh mint ice cream, Indian home cooking is sure to tantalise our taste buds. But while the dishes may be bursting with flavour upon flavour, it turns out that the intricacies of cooking with spice and flavour is easier to create at home than you might think. In her book Chilli and Mint, food writer Torie True is on a mission to help people bring more spice into their life, whether that’s in the form of chutneys, bread or even sweets treats.

EXCLUSIVE: Emmy award-winning Indian producer Apoorva Bakshi (Delhi Crime) has boarded The Glassworker, Pakistan’s first ever Hayao Miyazaki-style animated feature, as an executive producer. 

Naman Ramachandran Indian auteur Aribam Syam Sharma’s “Ishanou,” which screened at the Un Certain Regard strand at Cannes in 1991 is returning to the Croisette in a restored version. The Manipuri-language film is the only Indian film at the festival’s Cannes Classics section this year. “Ishanou” (“The Chosen One”), follows Tampha, a young woman with a loving husband and a small daughter, who leads a tranquil existence in the Manipur valley and is occupied with the mundane details of life. Suddenly she begins to behave in a strange manner, talking to flowers, becoming afflicted with dizzy spells and wandering out of the house in the dark of the night. The family tries to find a cure for her malady and finally realize that she does not have a sickness, but rather is responding to the call of a deity who has chosen her.

For foreign audiences, Indian cinema long has been closely associated with Bollywood — sprawling, colorful spectacles that feature songs and dance routines — and often one of the three Khans (the unrelated trio of Aamir, Salman and Shah Rukh). But there has been a shift across the past year as focus turned from Mumbai, which had suffered a string of misses until Shah Rukh Khan’s Pathaan took off on a tear early this year, toward Southern India.

Naman Ramachandran India’s Richa Chadha and the U.K.’s William Moseley will headline the cast of India-U.K. co-production “Aaina.” The film, set between London and India, is a drama about the impact of the cycle of violence, both within cultures and on human beings in the form of PTSD. It marks the feature directorial debut of Markus Meedt, who previously directed several acclaimed shorts, including “Shelter” and “Anonymous” and episodes of mini-series “Let’s Get Macho.” Chadha starred in “Gangs of Wasseypur” and “Masaan,” both of which debuted at Cannes. She was most recently in Disney+ Hotstar series “The Great Indian Murder.” Moseley made a mark as a child actor in the Narnia franchise. He was one of the leads in “Land of Dreams,” which debuted at Venice, and was also in Indian film “Margarita With A Straw,” which had festival play at Toronto, Busan and London.

Naman Ramachandran Indian multiplex chains PVR and Inox, which merged earlier this year, have launched a combined distribution arm PVR Inox Pictures, formerly PVR Pictures, “to increase investments in content acquisition to streamline high quality content for the Indian market, generate further opportunity for underrepresented storytellers and independent creators, and deliver a robust content slate to the Indian audience.” PVR Inox operates a network of 1689 cinema screens in 361 properties across 115 cities in India and Sri Lanka, and holds 43% share of multiplex screens in India. PVR Inox Pictures is the largest independent distributor of foreign language films and a prominent distributor of Indian films, in India.