Indian film on Souza wins London award

LONDON: An Old Dog’s Diary, a lyrical portrait of Indian artist Francis Newton Souza by Shai Heredia and Shumona Goel has won the best short film award at the 2015 London Film Festival, which concluded on Sunday.

Jury president Daisy Jacobs said: “An Old Dog’s Diary is as poetic and soulful as its subject. It offers a fresh and original way of documenting the life of an artist. It looks beautiful, sounds beautiful, but, more than that, it tells us about the beauty of the human spirit”.

The 11-minute film is described by the producers as one that “assembles, in puzzle-piece evocations, a portrait of Indian avantgarde painter Francis Newton Souza, revealing the cultural conditions for his work and its eventual institutionalisation”.

Besides Deepa Mehta’s Beeba Boys, three Indian films were shown at the festival: Aligarh (dir: Hansal Mehta), The New Classmate (dir: Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari) and Kothanodi (dir: Bhaskar Hazarika).

CHEVALIER NAMED BEST PICTURE AT FESTIVAL Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Chevalier was named best picture at the Festival.

Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, who headed the prize jury, said Tsangari’s film about a battle of egos among six men on a yacht was “both a hilarious comedy and a deeply disturbing statement on the condition of Western humanity.”

(With agency inputs)