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The National
an hour ago
- Business
- The National
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a balloon theatre bringing the cinema experience to rural India
When a bright yellow inflatable structure appeared in the heart of Leh, a remote Himalayan town 3,505 metres above sea level, Jigmet Angchok initially mistook it for a bouncy castle. But when he stepped inside the "balloon theatre" he found a fully-fledged cinema equipped with Dolby digital sound, plush pushback seats and stunning picture quality. The radio DJ, 32, was inside the world's highest-altitude cinema and couldn't contain his excitement. 'I was always curious about what it was like to watch a film on a big screen,' Angchok tells The National. 'This wonderful theatre had appeared in front of my eyes, just like the ones in big cities.' Cinema frenzy nation India is a nation of movie buffs, with 2,000 different Hindi or Bollywood and regional productions shown in cinemas each year. But for millions, particularly in rural parts of the country, a night at the cinema has long been a distant and expensive dream. Since 1913, when a film was shown on the big screen for the first time, cinemas have evolved from single screen theatres to multiplexes. But there are only 10,000 cinemas and 30,000 screens in a country that is home to 1.4 billion people. Most of them are in big cities or towns, according to research by the Producers Guild of India. For movie buffs like Angchok, watching a film in a brick-and-mortar cineplex was, for a long time, a far-fetched dream. There was not a single cinema hall in Ladakh, an arid region in northern India which generally remains covered in five metres of snow for four months during winter, until Picture Time arrived in 2021 to install an inflatable cinema. Its mobile movie theatres are designed to give an unparalleled experience to enthusiasts like Angchok. 'There used to be a cinema hall in town during my childhood, but it closed in the late 2000s,' Angchok says. 'So I grew up watching films on CD players or screened at a community hall. I always longed to watch a film at a cinema on a big screen.' About 1,500km from Leh, the capital of Ladakh, Tarun Soni had a similar experience. The cinephile had to travel 150km from his small town of Nagaur to a nearby city like Jodhpur in the desert region of Rajasthan, a journey of three hours each way, to watch a film on a big screen. All that changed for Soni when the inflatable cinema arrived. 'Initially we were apprehensive,' says the school principal, 30. 'This is a windy place and we were worried that the structure would be blown away. But once inside, we din't feel any difference. One time we were watching a film and it was raining heavily, but we did not feel a thing. The picture and sound quality is excellent. 'It is a small town and we had never had a theatrical experience before. Since this concept was introduce, people have been excited about films, especially families, because they now have a place to go for an outing.' Cinema in small towns Picture Time is the brainchild of Delhi -based entrepreneur Sushil Chaudhary, who strongly believes watching films in a cinema is 'not just entertainment but a fundamental part of life'. Chaudhary, 50, came up with the idea of bringing the big screen experience to small towns. 'Multiplex cinemas are in malls, but there is a shortage around the country,' he explains. 'I wanted something that would be more accessible and thought a portable cinema could solve the problem.' After years of research, Picture Time opened an experimental inflatable cinema in Chhattisgarh in 2019. It was a huge success, encouraging Chaudhary to replicate his idea across India. He has since set up more than 27 cinemas, from Ladakh to Bommidi in Tamil Nadu in southern India. His inflatable theatres have 120 to 180 seats and can be set up to stand on any ground for 15 years. That idea came to him when he was at a birthday party which had a bouncy castle. 'We were designing at the time,' Chaudhary recalls. 'My aim was to create an air-conditioned cinema that was easy to erect and portable.' His inflatable cinema has proper acoustics and is fire-resistant. Balanced air circulation ensures it can withstand high temperatures. Streaming challenge Streaming is all the rage these days, but a 2023 study by online platform BookMyShow found that 98 per cent of Indians still believe in the magic of cinema. India has 547.3 million users on streaming platforms but only 100 million paid subscribers, according to research by media consulting firm Ormax Media. Cinema's popularity endures. 'When we release a big film, 300 to 400 people turn up every day,' says Stenzin Tankyong, an entrepreneur who owns a Picture Time franchise in Ladakh. The big screen and audio experience are only part of the attraction. Angchok points out that cinemas give audiences a chance to enjoy a film with friends over a large tub of popcorn. 'Cinemas have charm,' he says. 'They are the complete package. People enjoy watching films on big screens with popcorn and this experience is not available at home.'
Geek Vibes Nation
2 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Vibes Nation
Notes On A Virtual Cannes: ‘Dandelion's Odyssey,' ‘Death Does Not Exist,' ‘I Only Rest in the Storm,' and ‘Meteors'
The Croisette seems nice. Many have heard tell of its luxurious essence, what with the many movie stars, auteurs, producers, and journalists that annually trot its boulevard during the Cannes Film Festival. Cinephilia is the name of the game on those hallowed grounds, the air that reeks of ticket-reservation anxiety only being masked by the booze-sponsored scattered around the premises. Of course, I'm only guessing based on my experience at other festivals, and in all likelihood, these already vague details are dead wrong. Cannes remains on the bucket list, though as with any fest that is programmed to the gills, plenty of writers and critics such as myself and others at GVN have been lucky enough to catch a few of the titles that premiered in France earlier this month from home. For a few of them, I even crafted a homemade cheese board to set the proper mood. One's couch may not rival the Agnès Varda or Debussy screening venues. But worthwhile cinema, varying quality aside, has no set time zone nor locale. The following few Cannes premieres are living proof of exactly that. Dandelion's Odyssey (Momoko Seto) What to make of a longtime short film animator's feature debut, one that splits the difference between Flow and the weeds that terrorize your front yard berm? Perhaps there's no more important takeaway than the very plot of Momoko Seto's entrancing (if slight) Dandelion's Odyssey, the 76-minute saga of four dandelions working together to survive the challenges of an unknown cosmos, one that might make you reconsider yanking them from the soil in the future. After a series of nuclear explosions propelled them into space, the 'blowballs' – named Dendelion, Baraban, Léonto and Taraxa – find their search for safe sod to be a bit more treacherous than they bargained for. A clear comment on the modern climate catastrophe that continues to pillage the planet – and immigration, depending on your read – Seto's film sounds like a ridiculous ask only in terms of asking its audience to feel something for a quartet of Irish daisies, yet the director has her fingers firmly planted on the pulse of exactly what makes one exude compassion. It's easy for a viewer to weep over the fate of a black cat and his unlikely companions (one of which is a yellow lab, no less) as many did with Gints Zilbalodis' Oscar-winning film last year, but to inspire a similar response with plants, let alone dandelions, is tough, and not a task anyone would ever consider achievable. Seto succeeds in that effort, even if the film itself grows repetitive and farcical as its protagonists encounter threats in the form of fellow flora and fauna, not to mention the smattering of insects and amphibians that seem more dangerous on the surface than they are in execution. In order for a film to stretch beyond the bounds of being a mood piece, it has to do more, and to make us do more. Are questions about climate change bound to arise from Dandelion's Odyssey? If they do, they aren't new ones, nor the kind that will take us anywhere particularly revolutionary. Granted, that's a lot of unwarranted pressure to place on a wordless work of inspired animation – and my stars, is it that – but films are birthed into a world of demand, and it's difficult to note whether or not Seto's answers the call. It's triumphant in one sense, and more of a head-scratcher than it needs to be in another. (5/10) Death Does Not Exist (Félix Dufour-Laperrière) Not to be confused with Ryusuke Hamaguchi's masterful Evil Does Not Exist, Félix Dufour-Laperrière's French-Canadian triumph actually has something in common with the former title: Both films, both in name and in narrative, argue the opposite of what they proclaim with their labels. Death, like evil, is inevitable according to Dufour-Laperrière, and his fourth feature – equal parts Romain Gavras' Athena and Hayao Miyazaki's worldview – examines how a young person might reckon with that certainty. It's a foregone conclusion that our individual clocks will eventually tick down to their final seconds. The idea that Death Does Not Exist probes is how we choose to spend that time, and what we stand to gain and/or lose from every decision we make with it. The decision at the center of Dufour-Laperrière's film is for a group of radicals to make: In an effort to send a strong climate-related message to their community and the world at large, these juveniles aim to attack a powerful family at their lavish residence, hoping that their actions will change the course of history. After the last minute – notably, not 'at' – Hélène (voiced by Zeneb Blanchet) cannot go through with her part, beliefs be damned. It's a shocking decision that is sure to alter her future, but in what sense? Stunning illustration and the inspired, haunting use of limited colors keep Dufour-Laperrière's themes from ever being too challenging to assess, but his film's existential nature is never lost, especially given the writer-director's laser-honed focus on his complicated heroines (Karelle Tremblay's 'Manon' is a key figure to follow) and their equally complex partnership. In many ways, Death Does Not Exist is what one could imagine an animated film by Ladj Ly would look like, a credit to Dufour-Laperrière's understanding of how varying age groups understand and react to the backwards social and political machinations of their world. Gutting, imaginative, and a small but mighty standout. (7/10) 'I Only Rest in the Storm' (Pedro Pinho) Pedro Pinho's latest epic is a near four-hour task of a film that does its best to reward its viewer's patience by never being uninteresting. Here's the thing: Your patience will depend on a lot. For one, how strong your appetite is for a marathon that might seem as though it has no idea whether it wants to be a documentary or a scathing drama, let alone what it wants to be about. There's also the fact that it could feasibly have been separated into a number of shorts, its avant-garde, vignette-reliant construction resembling something closer to the work of Wang Bing than a true auteur. Now, that might just be Pinho's point with I Only Rest in the Storm: That fiction and nonfiction are interchangeable, not these 'genre' stipulations we tend to be far too quick to apply to every damn film that achieves proper circulation. His lead, Sérgio Coragem (playing Sérgio, natch), aids that idea. An engineer, he was brought from Portugal to Guinea-Bissau by an NGO to draft an 'impact assessment report' on an abandoned project but spends more time with two locals, best friends Diára (Cleo Diára) and Gui (Jonathan Guilherme), and the many more figures he encounters blur the lines between drama and documentary. (And not solely because of how much time Pinho enjoys spending with a gamut of non-professional actors.) An odyssey-level journey, I Only Rest in the Storm's focus is primarily pinned to a triumvirate of thematic prongs: The impact of Sérgio's whiteness on the community he's entered, the film's setting and its colonial history (namely the neo-colonialism its main character represents), and how the way one treats their responsibility can cause both internal and external harm. But Pinho's curiosity regarding these three ideas can't hinder his obsession-level partiality to Sérgio's sex life, a distracting element that ultimately reduce I Only Rest in the Storm to being an assemblage of a few curious films stuffed into a single massive one that doesn't quite know how to be about any of its many far-reaching – and far more compelling – concepts. Theoretically, this could have existed in a league similar to something like Miguel Gomes' brilliant Grand Tour. Instead, it's a film that wouldn't feel misnomered if it took the title of Pinho's 2017 feature: The Nothing Factory. (5/10) Météors (Hubert Chaurel) 'The heart of the film is [Paul Kircher, Idir Azougli and Salif Cissé,]' Météors writer-director Hubert Chaurel – premiering his second feature and first since 2017 – said of his film's cast. 'We wrote a story about characters who have known and cherished each other for a long time… If their mutual feelings were not believable, the film was doomed.' Thankfully, Météors is anything but doomed, but Chaurel isn't far off: If not for the undeniable chemistry between his three leads, the picture in question wouldn't be nearly as successful as it is in portraying the bond between a delinquent-adjacent duo (and their third, slightly more mature pal) careening towards chaos. Yet so much about Meteors feels lightyears beyond the actual experience its filmmaker possesses that you can see a world in which their connection is frayed and the movie is still highly engaging, if not as remarkable. Chaurel's innate knack for mining emotions, especially those of young men, goes for the jugular to the point where you're not only fearful for the boys' safety, but their well-being beyond the closing credits. Couple that with a startling visual sensibility – cinematographer Jacques Girault's nightlife-heavy tableaus never feel forced nor used as plug-and-play settings for a drama about troubled, misbehaving adolescents – and you have one of the festival's hidden gems. Perhaps this is no surprise given the talent Chaurel displayed in his 2017 feature Bloody Milk, the winner of that year's 'Best First Film' prize at Cannes, as well as Kircher (a consistent standout; no different here) and Azougli's rising stardom in French cinema. But what's really refreshing is a story about broken boys that genuinely roots itself in the heartbreak they struggle to manage and communicate. A simple premise – with a few stray, unexpected elements not worth spoiling here – is one thing. Taking it beyond the limits of its motifs, at least as they appear on paper, is what gives you one of this young year's best films. (8/10)
Forbes
4 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Netflix's Best New Movie Has Near-Perfect Critic And Audience Scores
The Wild Robot It can be tough to know what to watch on Netflix in a given day or night, but the service has licensed one of the best movies I've seen in recent years, kid-focused or otherwise. While children may have been its target audience, it's a movie that all ages can enjoy. That would be The Wild Robot, the 2024 Dreamworks film about a lost robot that bonds with forest animals and ultimately becomes their guardian against encroaching technology. Here's the synopsis: The Wild Robot has stunning scores from both critics and audiences. With 253 reviews in, The Wild Robot has a 96% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes and with 5,000+ audience reviews, an even higher 98%. On IMDB it has an 8.2/10, which in the context of that site, is extremely high, and a full quarter of its reviews are 10/10. Having seen the film myself, I think it very much lives up to these high scores. The Wild Robot It's a kids movie, but it isn't. It's one of those situations where a movie aimed at children can be so good that parents and kids alike will enjoy watching it together as opposed to the adults just sitting around flipping through their phones while it's on. For me, the best part of The Wild Robot is its absolutely gorgeous animation, where I've really never seen anything quite like it. The story is good, sure, perhaps a tiny bit cliché, but there is no frame of this film that isn't fantastic to look at. It's an easy recommendation for all ages, and family statuses. If you don't have kids or aren't watching it with any, it doesn't matter, as it's worth checking out for anyone. There are likely going to be two more films in the series adapting two more books that the first one was based on, but we do not have much information about those as of yet. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
CTV News
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- CTV News
A search for family through Canada's Indian residential school system
Montreal Watch 'The Knowing' director Courtney Montour speaks about the CSA-nominated project that explores family, community and strength in the face of residential schools.
Globe and Mail
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
Jesse Armstrong's Mountainhead: Succession's successor sharply satirizes a new class of billionaire
Before he transformed the idea into a hit HBO television series, the British screenwriter Jesse Armstrong first wrote Succession as a film. I've always been curious what kind of movie Armstrong's original screenplay – which landed on the so-called 'Black List' of best unproduced screenplays of 2010 – would have resulted in. Armstrong's new HBO film that premieres in Canada on Saturday night on Crave (8 p.m. ET) may be the closest we'll ever get to seeing what that would have looked like. While not a Succession spin-off per se, Mountainhead certainly seems to exist in an expansion of its universe – where the characters and the satire are both extremely rich. The film begins with a bit of exposition, efficient if not all that elegant, that sets up the background of the story through news footage. Traam, a social media site used by billions around the world, has introduced a new suite of artificial intelligence features. Without any moderation, they have led to bad actors to create real-time deepfakes that have quickly sparked violent and even genocidal conflict all around the globe. Despite this worldwide chaos he's created, Traam's cocky owner Venis (Cory Michael Smith) – the richest man in the world and, from a brief glimpse of his parenting style, at least partly modelled on Elon Musk – is headed off on a weekend retreat with his tech-bro besties. An oversized SUV, private jet and helicopter ride away is a new mountaintop mansion in the Canadian Rockies that has been built by Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), who, with a net worth of merely $500-million, is considered the poorest of his billionaire pals. Indeed, he's nicknamed Soupy, short for Soup Kitchen, for that reason. (Yes, Hugo has named his retreat Mountainhead in an apparently non-ironic homage to objectivist novelist Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.) Also joining on this jaunt are Randall (Steve Carrell), described as a 'Dark Money Gandalf' and unwilling to admit that all the wealth in the world cannot cure the type of cancer he has; and Jeff (Ramy Youssef), who has a modicum of ethics compared to the others and a rival AI platform that quickly could undo all the damage that Traam is doing – but only if Venis names the right price. Full of poetically garbled tech jargon and inventively profane put-downs, Armstrong's screwball dialogue in this film is as enjoyable – and unquotable in this newspaper – as Succession's at its most absurd. His satire is sharpest in the ways he parodies tech-bro libertarian stances. In self-serving denial of the effect of Traam is having, Venis recalls that when the Lumière Brothers showed their first movie of a train, the audience jumped for cover. 'The answer to that was not stop the movies,' he says, with the type of specious argument one normally has to pay big bucks to hear at a Munk Debate. 'The answer was show more movies.' Randall follows up with his own risible reasoning to ignore the suffering of others, delivered in a sarcastic tone: 'There will be eight to 10 cardiac arrests during the Super Bowl. Stop the Super Bowl!' For all its line-by-line dark pleasures, Mountainhead would quickly grow tiring were it not for the fact that Armstrong's plotting of shifting power dynamics among these four is pretty clever as well. Venis has to dance around how to get Jeff's AI without compromising his pride, while Randall goes deeper and deeper into dangerous delusion as he imagines that perhaps Traam's 'creative destruction' might speed up the eventuality of transhumanism and the ability for his consciousness to be uploaded to the mainframe. Then, there's insecure Hugo who will go along with any plan as long as someone invests in his meditation app that he hopes might finally push him over a billion in net worth. There is, however, an unresolved tension at the heart of Mountainhead, as there was in Succession, between how much the audience hates these characters and also enjoys spending time laughing at (with?) them – and how to balance the fact that the ultra-rich are beyond the reach of consequences, while satisfying the desire to punish them. Unable to really have his characters develop or truly grapple with the implications of their actions without humanizing them, Armstrong returns to his old underwhelming stand-by – scenes in which his monsters stare into the distance miserably, or look at themselves in the mirror as if try to the find shreds of humanity behind their mask. Ultimately, with so much of Mountainhead's action taking place in a single location, you see how Armstrong's style of writing is suited for a TV screen over a big one – and why it's for the best Succession didn't happen as a movie. Indeed, you could even see Mountainhead dropped on a stage, with minimal edits to the script. Finally, male actors who wanted to explore the depths of toxic masculinity and American capitalism would have a more up-to-date work than David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross (incidentally, now on in New York starring Kieran Culkin).
