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A made-in-Canada TV fest for Bollywood
Canada's largest South Asian Broadcaster, ATN will produce a 100-episode television series which aims to take viewers on a nostalgic ride into the world of Bollywood and Indian cinema.
The series will feature 100 celebrities from the world's largest film industry with an international perspective and feature exclusive interviews with stalwarts of the Indian film industry including movie Stars, producers, directors, composers and playback singers.
“The production is based on the interviews and shared moments with the icons of the Indian cinema who, while on foreign soil and away from the film studios, have dropped their guard and opened up to show their real personal warmth and their real personal charm that, amongst other things, makes the production very unique and original,” ATN said in a statement.
ATN's Tribute to 100 Years Of Indian Cinema will include exclusive interviews with Mega Movie Stars from the Hindi Film Industry such as Raj Kapoor, Devanand, Dilip Kumar, Sunil Dutt, Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra, Rajesh Khanna, Hema Malini, Rekha, Sridevi, Shahrukh Khan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Priyanka Chopra, Sunny Deol and producers and directors like Yash Chopra, V. Shantaram, Ramanand Sagar, B. R Chopra, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Mira Nair & Manmohan Desai to name a few.
It will also include mega stars from the Southern Indian film industry such as Dr. M.G. Ramachandran, Shivaji Ganesan, Gemini Ganesan, Rajanikant, Kamala Hassan, Prabhu Deva, Jaya Pradha, and more and artists from the Punjabi Film Industry such as Gurdas Mann, Aryan Babbar, Om Puri, Sonu Sood, Diljit Dosanjh, Narender Chanchal, Rupinder Handa & Divya Dutta
ATN will pay its tribute through outstanding singers such as the Nightingale of India Lata Mangeshkar, Kishore Kumar, Mohammad Rafi, Oscar winner A R Rahman, Mukesh, Asha Bhosle, Ghulam Ali, Jagjit Singh, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and others. ATN will also showcase Canadian success stories' contribution to Indian Cinema such as Deepa Mehta, Jaspinder Narula, Harbhajan Mann, Lisa Ray, Adnan Sami, Raghav and many more.
"It has been a privilege to have been involved with the Canadian Broadcast Industry and the Indian Film Industry. My mather, a lawyer turned film producer was a pioneer in Indian cinema,” said Dr. Shan Chandrasekar President and CEO of ATN.
“He was one among the first in Southern India to produce a feature film with sound. As the founder of ATN in Canada I am delighted to be blessed with this opportunity to be associated with the Centenary Celebration of Indian Cinema" said Dr. Chandrasekar.
The series will commence in September 2013 and run for 52 weeks at prime time on ATN HD and other selected ATN affiliated Channels.
ATN will deploy close to 100 staff members for this project at different levels including programming, script writing, production, post production, graphics, marketing and sales. ATN may also be syndicating selected shows internationally.
The series will be produced at ATN's new HD studios and broadcast centre, using footage from its original Canadian Production Archives, some of which may not be available anywhere else in the world.
The ATN production is part of global celebration of the song-and-dance-laden Bollywood film industry.
India is home to regional industries making films in more than 20 languages - but Mumbai's Hindi-speaking Bollywood is the biggest of all.
Indians buy 2.7 billion movie tickets annually, the highest in the world. But average ticket prices are among the lowest in the world so revenues are a fraction of Hollywood's.
For a country that is obsessed with films, there are still very few cinema screens. India has fewer than 13,000 screens compared with nearly 40,000 screens in the US.
India produced almost 1,500 movies last year and the industry is expected to grow from $2 billion to $3.6 billion in the next five years, according to consultancy KPMG.
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