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Have You Picked A Side? Watch Trailer For Mira Nair's Reluctant Fundamentalist

So whose side are you on? it's a question been asked in Mira Nair's post 9/11 drama The Reluctant Fundamentalist which now has an official trailer check it out below.

Based on a award-winning 2007 novel by Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist stars Riz Ahmed as Changez a talented young Pakistani man who graduates from Princeton. Thanks to his hard work he finds himself in a lucrative position on Wall street but this is 2001 before then after the events of 11 September 2001 a tragic event that sees the American dream wilt away and his views on America plus himself gradually change.

Nearly 12 years after the tragic events of 9/11 fear still roams  though it may not be on the same level  it's still there sadly a lot of that fear and prejudice especially against anyone of the Muslim faith. Simply because of your faith you become a target of racial profiling, bigots you could say creating monsters out of those who think everyone from the Middle East, Asia, Africa even our on country is a terrorist which we know is a lie.In The Reluctant Fundamentalist it takes centre stage, who Am I ? The film may not deliver something highly original but  evaluates the manner of the things that take place.It's great to British actor Riz Ahmed like Noel Clarke finally starting to move into the more glamorous route of Hollywood who looks to deliver a strong controlled performance.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is set for a 19th April UK release with a limited 26th April release in USA. The film co-stars Liev Schreiber, Keifer Sutherland, Kate Hudson, Om Puri and Martin Donavan.


source:Yahoo!

Trishna - Riz Ahmed Interview

This Monday 9th July will see the release of Michael Winterbottom’s Trishna on DVD and Blu Ray which is a modern adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s classic Tess of the d’Ubervilles moving from bleak 19th Century Industrial England to modern day Rajahstan, India. To promote the film’s release on July 9th on DVD & Blu-Ray our good friends at Artificial Eye have sent a very interesting in depth interview with the British Actor. Yesterday was Frieda Pinto and you can read her interview here, fancy winning the film on DVD? We have 5 copies of the film to give away enter here!

Q: How did you get involved in the project? We know you’ve worked with Michael before, take us through the process and tell us why you wanted to be a part of it?
A: Michael randomly got in touch and invited me for lunch and a catch up and told me he had adapted ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ and that he wanted to set it in modern India, crossing classes and cultures. In his usual informal relaxed way, he offered me the role and I said yes of course!

Q: Who is Jay? What sort of background does he come from? What motivates him? Is his privilege and lack of ‘hunger’ his curse?
A: He’s the youngest son of a rich Indian businessman. He’s in his mid-20s and he hasn’t managed to step out of his father’s shadow and really make his own way or make a success of his life on his own terms. He suffers from the lost rich kid syndrome. He’s on this trip to India from Britain with his friends as a last kind of blow out before he stays on in India to run some of his father’s newly acquired hotels in Rajasthan. He’s frustrated because he has to slot into that role rather than have his own projects and that both haunts and drives him as a character and ultimately the project he finds and latches onto is Trishna herself. He seeks her out and tries to develop her, to satisfy his own needs and make something his own.

In some ways you could say his privilege is a curse in the sense that he’s got a lot to live up to. But in other ways, he does try to break away in his own direction when he goes to Bombay. He’s only able to do that and have that financial independence because of his wealth. It’s more that he fails in that and it’s more about the family and where he’s coming from being bigger than him. I feel a major theme in the film is about where you’re coming from. It explores that magnetic and gravitational pull and the momentum you can try and drum up of your own accord. Trishna’s background is something she can never really get away from. Similarly for Jay, his position of minor heir to the business means that he gets sucked back into it and responsibility comes knocking at his door. That’s the start of his decline and when he realizes he’s failed to strike out in his own direction, Trishna becomes this kind of toy and symbol of his failure every time he sees her.

Q: Does he really fall in love with Trishna?
A: Yes, but I guess we’ve been talking from the point of view of the macro themes and where he’s coming from means there’s a tragic outcome to the relationship. But, on a personal level, there is something there and he’s completely bewitched by Trishna. She represents the ideal of an innocent woman for him – the virgin maid and it is a kind of love. When they’re in Bombay they are in love, but the limitations in the relationship come from the gap between them being so vast.

There’s only so much they can talk about – their world views only overlap to a certain extent. At the point where they’re talking about the abortion that’s something that really frustrates Jay, because Trishna didn’t make her own mind up about that and she kept it from him. I guess honour trumps honestly and openness for Trishna. There is love between them but as with every relationship, what makes up that love is lots of different things. Maybe for Jay at the beginning, he almost over-idealizes her, he sees her as a way of re-connecting with his ethnic background and to reconnect with something pure and innocent and something that’s his own. The limitations of all those things in the relationship start emerging and he feels he’s failed in his own life.

Q: Did you read Tess of the D’Urbervilles before embarking on this film?
A: After Michael told me about the film, that was when I read the book but I hadn’t read it previous to that. At first I thought it was kind of daunting to try and combine two great characters from literature but what became clear was that it wasn’t going to be a literal adaptation of Hardy’s novel. Angel’s love for Tess is pure whilst Alec’s is a more selfish love. In the novel they’re never really on the scene at the same time so that meant we could take on the spirit or psychology of one character and then at different stages in the story, introduce the other. To begin with, Jay idealizes Trishna in the same way that Angel idealizes Tess. He sees her as a pure woman and views the experience as a return to a natural way and all that is good and pure. When Jay is at the hotel with his friends, he spots this girl from the village and this real obsessive but full-blooded love emerges and at this point we see Angel’s spirit of his affection for her, but what we start to get is a gradual decline into Alec. Having a novel to base the characters and ideas on gives you a rich armoury for you to draw on. If we’d have been too faithful to the novel, we’d have all gone mad!

Q: There are strong similarities between Hardy’s England and what’s happening in India right now. Can we explore that?
A: Yes, that’s a very interesting thing to draw on. India is changing at break- neck speed with modernization, industrialization and mass migration from the countryside into more urban centres and we explore how the old world and new world are rubbing up against each other. The idea of morality is very pertinent because it’s very important to point out that some western audiences may find themselves slightly confused as to why Trishna feels embarrassed about sleeping with Jay and why she feels she needs to run away and why she feels mortified at having had the abortion. This is all a big deal for her. The issue is about traditional morality and that’s what it’s like in large swathes of the world to this day, where sex before marriage and having children out of wedlock is still a huge deal and that shame can destroy a family in terms of their public standing. Maybe people need to realize that’s a reality when they’re watching the film.

Q: You filmed in India with a small crew, on real locations and there was a lot of improvisation. What were the challenges and what were the joys of that?
A: Working with Michael, there’s always a very small crew, it’s a very intimate and very informal experience. Michael never calls action or cut. It’s a very relaxed, gentle, natural process in term of the atmosphere created for the actors. For the production crew I guess it’s not so relaxed – it’s crazy that’s because there’s so much that’s being achieved and Michael has very high standards and he’s a real stickler for authenticity. The burden of that kind of pressure probably falls on the production but for the actors it’s a really unique experience. There’s no right or wrong – you just have to embrace the fact that you don’t know what the hell’s going happen because there isn’t really a script and you’ve got a very basic idea and you just jump into it and that’s the whole nature of improvising and the nature of working with Michael.

Q: What was it like taking on your first romantic lead?
A: I guess I’d never really thought about it being a romantic lead. It’s a romantic story but also a tragedy and a drama. From my point of view I try to make the characters I play as complicated for myself as possible so I don’t have to have a very clear grip on who they are day-to-day on set, so you get a fuller picture of them at the end of the film. That’s also part of how it is working with Michael – not having a rigid, fixed view of the characters. We had a lot of long conversations and you can build up this very intricate back story to the character – what books he might read, what music he’d like to listen to, how growing up was for him and you concoct this back story but in terms of how the character would be at the end of the journey you can’t really control that kind of thing. So, I guess that’s a very long way of saying I never really thought of it as a romantic lead!

Q: What was it like working with Freida?
A: A lot of fun – she’s a very cool girl. I think she’s an incredibly instinctive and natural actress. She’s very generous and there’s minimal fuss with her. Working with her is one of the easiest processes because she’s incredibly self-sufficient. She’s generous about giving you space and time to develop your character. For me it’s ideal to work with someone like that, particularly when you’re working with Michael and the process is one where things change and evolve and everything’s very flexible. Michael wants you to be natural and that creates a really nice atmosphere on set.

Q: Trishna is more complex than Jay gives her credit for. How does he view her?
A: Yeah, it’s not that he judges her but it’s almost like at certain points he feels that he has to give up. Because of the different cultures they’re coming from, he feels that her mind is unknowable. If he presses her on why she didn’t tell him about certain things or why certain things happened, she won’t speak her mind in an articulate way to allow him to understand her. There’s an extent to which Jay feels really frustrated with that – especially how passive she can be. I don’t think Jay thinks Trishna is simple-minded, he just feels she’s hard to get to grips with and it’s hard to know what’s really going on in her head. He gets more and more frustrated at how passive she is and how she won’t complain and won’t stand her ground. She won’t challenge him on why he left her in Bombay and she won’t say why she didn’t tell him about the abortion. On a personal level he’s frustrated with how passive she is so he tries to provoke her out of her passivity. He wants to know what she really thinks. On another level he’s just really frustrated at how things have turned out for him and he’s deeply wounded by that. He’s had this lifestyle of entitlement but he starts lashing out at her. Ultimately he does provoke her and it destroys both of them – he takes it too far and I don’t think that’s what he had in mind.

Win TRISHNA On DVD

"How Far Would You Go For Love?"

Based on Thomas Hardy’s classic novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles, TRISHNA is a beautifully shot, classic tale of love and tragedy set across modern day rural Rajasthan and the thriving metropolis of Mumbai. Starring Frieda Pinto (Slumdog Millionaire, Rise of the Planet of the Apes) and Riz Ahmed (Four Lions, The Road to Guantanamo) and directed by acclaimed British director Michael Winterbottom (9 Songs, 24 Hour Party People) TRISHNA comes to DVD & Blu-ray 9 July. To celebrate the release courtesy of Artificial Eye Film with 5 copies of the film to be won on DVD opened to all The Peoples Movies and Cinehouse readers.

Trishna (Freida Pinto) meets a wealthy young British businessman, Jay Singh (Riz Ahmed), who has come to India to work in his father's hotel business. After an accident destroys her father's Jeep, Trishna goes to work for Jay, and they fall in love. But despite their feelings for each other, their relationship must remain a secret due to the conflicting pressures of a rural society which is changing rapidly through industrialisation, urbanisation and, above all, education.Their problems seem to be solved when Jay takes Trishna to an exciting new world of dance, vibrant life and possibilities - Mumbai. But Trishna harbours a dark secret that threatens the very heart of their love affair, and inequalities remain at the centre of their relationship that will lead her to question Jay's intentions towards her.

To be in with a chance of winning, answer the below question:

Q.Michael Winterbottom has adapted Thomas Hardy Novels Before Which of these did he adapt last?

a. The Claim
b. The Woodlanders
c. The Scarlett Tunic

 Send your answer , name, address, to have your email to win [at] thepeoplesmovies [dot] com header As ‘Trishna’. Deadline:July 22nd, 2012 (2359hrs) . Follow us at our Facebook Page if you haven’t done it already, double entry! If your entering via cinehouse please take note of the email to enter by.  
Terms and Conditions

• This prize is non-transferable.
• No cash alternatives apply.
• UK & Irish entries only The Peoples Movies, Cinehouse and Artificial Eye Films have the right to alter, delay or cancel this competition without any notice
• The competition is not opened to employees, family, friends of The Peoples Movies, Cinehouse,Artificial Eye Films employees
• This competition is promoted on behalf of Artificial Eye Films
• The Prize is to win Trishna on DVD, 5 winners
• To enter this competition you must send in your answer, name, address only, Deadline July 22nd, 2012 (2359hrs)
• Will only accept entries sent to the correct email (win [at] thepeoplesmovies [dot] com), any other entry via any other email will be void.
• The Peoples Movies, Cinehouse takes no responsibility for delayed, lost, stolen prizes
• The competition is opened to Aged 16 and over
• Unless Stated Please Do Not Include Telephone Numbers, we don’t need them
• The winning entries will be picked at random and contacted by email
• By sending your entry for this competition you are confirming you have read and agreed to these Terms & Conditions.

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