PRETORIA, South Africa (CNN) — Vikas Swarup was far from the poverty of Mumbai when he wrote “Slumdog Millionaire,” the book that has now become an award-winning movie and Academy Award nominee.

Vikas Swarup says he was inspired by the idea of an underdog coming out on top.

As a high-ranking Indian diplomat, his day job requires him to think about international relations, not the grit of survival in a teeming inner city.

But maybe his heart was in his homeland when he took his first stab at writing fiction with the story of an uneducated slum dweller who wins millions of rupees on a television quiz show.

He wrote the novel in 2003, while finishing an overseas posting before heading to New Delhi.

“My wife and children had already left for India. So I was two months alone in London,” Swarup said in an interview at the official residence of his current job as India’s Deputy High Commissioner to South Africa.

“There was no comfort, but more importantly there were no distractions. That’s why I wrote this book, almost in a frenzy. The idea was bubbling in my head.”

Swarup said he was inspired by the idea of an underdog coming out on top.

‘Slumdog’ author was inspired by opportunity, solitude – CNN.com.

Last year the champagne still flowed, but in 2009 angst will dominate the Berlin Film Festival. Cutbacks by studios, concerns about financing and a big-budget thriller about an evil bank — even the silver screen can’t ignore the world economic downturn.

Every movie gets the villains it deserves. Bandits attacking Indians? It’s a western. Hit men shooting police? A crime story. And when psychopaths try to achieve world domination, it’s either a terrorist drama or a film about Adolf Hitler. Those are the usual suspects.

Since the financial crisis, though, a range of unexpected villains has started parading across the screen. Werner Schulz, a politician from Germany’s Green Party, summed up the current mood a few days ago: “Now people are more afraid of their financial advisors than of al-Qaida.”

One German director seems to have anticipated this development. Tom Tykwer, known for his bank robbery fable “Run Lola Run,” will premiere his new thriller “The International” on Thursday, when it opens the 59th Berlin International Film Festival, or Berlinale. This time the bank itself is the villain.

The bank in the movie, in fact, is a criminal organization that commissions murder and homicide — a “bad bank” worse than anything from the current nightmares of the world’s finance ministers. The hero in “The International” is not a crusading protector of the public interest but British star Clive Owen (“Inside Man”).

The financial crisis will set the tone at this year’s Berlinale, the most important international film festival after Cannes. It will be the main topic of conversation at the parties and receptions, the festival’s speeches, press conferences and in the haggling over film rights and new productions.

Complete Article…

Worry Lines Through the Botox: Berlinale Reflects Leaner Times for Movie Business – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International.

PARK CITY, Utah–The Sundance Film Festival is all about film buzz. Word spreads quickly about the biggest tearjerkers, the most overhyped films, the pleasant surprises, and the ones mostly likely to make their way to the cineplex.

Filmmaker Ondi Timoner starts her day Monday, the day of her film’s world premiere, by getting her make-up done professionally. She knows she has many photo shoots ahead.

(Credit: Michelle Meyers/CNET News)

What you don’t hear, however, is what it’s like for the makers of such films as they anticipate showing their work to the world for the very first time. What is their range of emotions as they prepare for what could be a standing ovation or a mass exodus before the credits even roll?

Ondi Timoner, who’s here competing with her documentary, We Live in Public, gave CNET News some insight into the mania of festival life for a filmmaker by allowing us to shadow her Monday, the day of her film’s world premiere. We’ll tell you all about that jam-packed day, but first some background on the film and Timoner.

We Live in Public documents the tumultuous life of Josh Harris, who Timoner refers to as “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of.” It’s a sort of cautionary tale about the effect the Web is having on society.

During the 1990s dot-com boom, Harris was considered a sort of “Warhol of the Web” by creating the first Internet television network, Psuedo.com, and then an underground bunker in Manhattan where 100 people lived together on camera for 30 days before getting shut down as a millennial cult by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the New York police on New Year’s Day 2000.

Harris’ next experiment, which led him to a mental breakdown, was a six-month stint living with his girlfriend under 24-hour live surveillance online, long before the days of Justin TV.

A day in the life of a Sundance filmmaker | Digital Media – CNET News.

Amsterdam has three main attractions: Rembrandt in the Rijksmuseum; hookers in windows; and Anne Frank in the attic. It’s a contradictory cultural compendium in a contradictory city. You walk past the office on the canal, above and behind which are the secret rooms the Frank family silently lived in for two years; beneath it is a long, silent line of American-Jewish students waiting to get in for half an hour’s empathy. And you know that somewhere down this street or the next one is the house of the person who betrayed the Franks. Unknown, unremarked, still secret, there is a room where someone sat and thought: “After lunch, I must pop down to the Gestapo and hand in that family in the attic.” The Dutch hid 30,000 Jews, most of whom survived the war, but handed over more than 100,000, most of whom didn’t.

The English translation of Anne Frank’s diary was published here in the 1950s. It made a modest impact and went out of print. It was in America and, oddly, Japan that it became iconic. In Germany, it was regularly accused of being a forgery; too well written for an adolescent, they said. Anne did rewrite it. She wanted to be a novelist, dreamt of it being published; after the war, her father censored it to take out the critical things she had said about her mother. After he died, they went back in.

The Diary of Anne Frank, Nicholas Crane’s Britannia, Antiques Roadshow, The Antiques Rogue Show – Times Online.