PREMIERING MARCH, 2007

THE NAMESAKE

Director: Mira Nair
Novel By: Jhumpa Lahiri
Screenwriter: Sooni Taraporevala
Cast: Kal Penn, Tabu, Irrfan Khan, Jacinda Barrett,Zuleikha Robinson
Distributor: Fox SearchLight

Spanning two generations, two clashing cultures and two very different ways of life that collide, only to become lovingly intertwined, THE NAMESAKE is ultimately about the imminently relevant question: what does it mean to be an American family?

In her most personal film to date, acclaimed director Mira Nair brings to the screen a poignant and transporting version of Jhumpa Lahiri's best-selling novel, which won reader's hearts across the world with its exploration of the ties that can both tangle and bind global families as they brave the modern vicissitudes of change, conflict and disaster.

Hopscotching across twenty-five years, The Namesake begins when newlyweds Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli emigrate from Calcutta to New York. Ashima immediately gives birth to a son, Gogol-a pet name inspired by the Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol that becomes permanent when his formal name, traditionally bestowed by the maternal grandmother, is posted in a letter from India, but lost in transit.

A leap ahead to the eighties finds the teenage Gogol ashamed of his Indian heritage and his unusual name, which he sheds as he moves on to college and graduate school at Columbia. When Gogol falls in love with a young white woman, he moves into the home of her wealthy, Manhattan family and is initiated into a lifestyle idealized in Ralph Lauren ads. This relationship falls apart when his father dies and he experiences a re-connection with his traditional cultural values.

Later, his mother introduces him to a Bengali woman. They fall in love and marry, but they fail to find a common ground in the balance of Indian and American values in their own personal identities. The tale comes full circle when the protagonist, home for a Bengali Christmas, rediscovers his father's gift of Gogol's short stories and learns the true significance of his namesake, finally making peace with his unique culture identity.

DEVELOPMENT SLATE 2006-2007

 


FELA KUTI: MUSIC IS THE WEAPON

Book: "Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon"

By: Michael E. Veal
Screenwriter: Misan Sagay
Director: Open
Development: Focus Features

This is the sensational story of Fela, the founder of Afrobeat and one of the greatest and most controversial pop musicians of the 20th Century. Fela Anikulapo Kuti was born to Nigerian middle class, political parents, who sent him off to medical school in London where he fervently sought a career in music instead. Fela then moved to the U.S where he soon became a funk sensation influencing the likes of James Brown and Stevie Wonder and quickly became involved with the Black Panther movement. Fela took his body shaking Afrobeat sound and scathing lyrics back to his home in Nigeria where he was idolized yet continuously harassed, beaten, tortured, and jailed by the powers that be.

By the end of his life, Fela sought sovereignty for his own commune, had 27 wives, 77 albums and started a movement with a beat that still pulsates through musicians and music lovers today. Fela's legacy as a charismatic visionary is one that synthesized a unique musical language while also clearing a space for popular political dissent and a type of counter cultural expression extremely rare in West African societies.





VIRTUAL LOVE

Writer/Director: Richard Press
Based on: The New Yorker article, "Virtual Love," by Tad Friend
Cast: Alfred Molina

Virtual Love is the true story of Tony Johnson, who at the age of 15 has written a harrowing memoir about being abused, both physically and sexually, by his parents and their friends, and then being rescued by his new mom, Vicki, a social worker in Union City, NJ. Tony's subsequent struggle with AIDS made him the cause celebre of people all over the world--including the highly acclaimed novelist Paul Monette. Tony became one of the most important people in Paul's life. But when Paul wanted to meet him in person, it seemed that maybe Tony was too good to be true, that perhaps he didn't even exist.

Tony's controversial story is a powerful sorting device that separates the cynics from the romantics, causing us to wonder if perhaps the most real things in the world are those that neither children nor adults can see.





THE PROBABLE FUTURE

Novel by: Alice Hoffman
Screenwriter: Sally Robinson
Director: Katja von Garnier
Development: Shadowcatcher Entertainment

The Probable Future tells the story of a family of New England women with a mysterious legacy - for thirteen generations, on their 13th birthday, an extraordinary gift is revealed to each girl that is uniquely her own. Jenny Sparrow is able to see people's dreams, while her aging mother is able to discern a lie. Jenny's daughter Stella has just discovered she is able to see when and how people will die. When Stella has a vision about a death and asks her father to help prevent it, a terrible chain of events unfolds, entangling the family in a murder mystery. This ordeal leads Stella to the grandmother she was forbidden to meet and to a historic family home full of talismans.

Books: “Diamond: A struggle for Environmental
           Justice in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor”
           by Steve Lerner, MIT Press, 2005
          “Lost Diamond: Death, Sickness and One
           Woman's Fight for Justice in the Deep              South”
           by Ronnie Greene.
Screenwriter: Open
Director: Open

After years of mysterious fires and neighbors falling sick and dying, Margie Richard, a retired Louisiana schoolteacher, took matters into her own hands. She led a lengthy battle against the pair of Shell petrochemical plants that bookend the African-American community of Diamond in Norco, a small town upriver of New Orleans amid the toxic skein of industry dubbed Cancer Alley.

Shell wasn’t just a health menace; it was the town’s main employer, and community support largely broke along racial lines. But with a steely mix of faith and ingenuity, Richard, 64, led a grass roots effort, setting up a Web cam to broadcast illegal venting of toxic chemicals, and distributing buckets to the community to install their own atmospheric monitors.

When she realized there wasn’t enough power in Diamond to turn around a huge multinational corporation, she traveled to Nigeria with a former Peace Corps worker to view the hardships suffered by the Ogoni people in the Niger delta around the Royal Dutch/Shell plants. Working with a coalition of activists, she traveled to climate treaty negotiations being held at The Hague in the Netherlands. Accompanied by a documentary film crew, she invited Shell company executives to take a breath of Norco’s air and drink the polluted water sample she took in Lagos. Two weeks later, a top Shell executive from London was knocking on her trailer door in Diamond.

After a period of twelve years of organizing (1990 – 2002), Margie’s efforts succeeded when Shell agreed to invest more than $20 million in emission reduction and paid a minimum of $80,000 to each homeowner in a four block area near the plants in Diamond-an offer everybody accepted. This was a historic victory for fence-line communities in the U.S. (predominantly impoverished and African-American). In 2004 Richard became the first African-American to win the $125,000 Goldman Environmental Prize.





THE SILENT TWINS

Book by: Marjorie Wallace
Screenwriter: Open
Director: Open

This is the true story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, psychologically troubled identical twins living in Wales who, from early childhood, spoke only to each other in a secret language. Isolated from family and society, they built an elaborate fantasy life and then, during adolescence, plunged into a wild crime spree that led to their incarceration in a hospital for the criminally insane.

Marjorie Wallace, a writer for the Sunday Times, reported on their trial on charges of arson and theft. In her exploration of the girls' world she discovered an extraordinary collection of diaries, typed manuscripts of stories, novels and poems, illustrated strips and drawings. Wallace befriended the twins and developed a relationship that revealed an unforgettable story of love and hate, destruction and genius.





CHAOS

Screenwriter: Coline Serreau, Michelle Joyner
Director: Coline Serreau
Development: HBO Films

In this gripping and savagely satirical American remake of Coline Serreau's original French film Chaos, Helene and Paul, a middle class couple, are rushing to a dinner party when they see Malika, a young prostitute, being chased by three men. As the thugs slam the woman onto their windshield, Paul rolls up the windows and speeds off.

Full of remorse, Helene tracks down Malika in the hospital the next day. As Helene nurses Malika through her recovery, she realizes that her life has been irrevocably altered. She can never return to her selfish husband and philandering teenage son. After Malika tells Helene the shocking and dramatic story of how she wound up in the sex slave industry, Helene decides to join forces with Malika in an elaborate and daring scheme to double-cross her pimps and attain both her freedom and her revenge.





RUTHIE and CONNIE

Based on: A documentary film, "Ruthie & Connie: Every Room               in the House"
Screenwriter: Jane Anderson and Pamela Gray
Director: Jane Anderson
Development: HBO Films

Ruthie and Connie is the true story of two Jewish housewives living in Brooklyn, who met as young mothers during the 1960s and began a warm friendship centered around their growing families and local activist endeavors.

In the 1970s, their friendship blossoms into an unexpected romance, catching the two women very much by surprise. Terrified their families will find out, they promise to end their affair. Connie's family resettles in Israel, widening the gulf between them. But when Connie returns to Brooklyn two years later for a wedding, the sparks re-ignite and Ruthie and Connie quickly realize they cannot live without each other. In the emerging era of feminist consciousness, Ruthie and Connie ultimately make the bravest of choices to leave their families and create a life together.





THE OUTCASTS OF 19 SCHUYLER PLACE

Novel by: E.L. Konigsburg
Development: HBO Films
Writer/Director: Maggie Greenwald
The summer she's twelve, Margaret Rose must confront a catastrophe brewing in her own backyard.

Freshly rescued from a miserable experience at sleep away camp where she shared a bunk with seven cruel cabin mates, Margaret Rose is looking forward to spending the rest of her summer with her beloved and eccentric Hungarian great-uncles, Morris and Alexander. Little does she know, the Uncles themselves are in need of a rescue.

For the last forty-five years, the Uncles have been building three giant towers in their backyard, original works of art made from scrap metal and shards of glass, porcelain, and old clocks. But now, bowing to pressure from some powerful homeowners, the towers have been declared a blight on the neighborhood. Even worse, the city council has voted to have them destroyed.

Margaret Rose is outraged. She knows the towers for what they truly are: irreplaceable works of art. To her, the towers sing of the joy of making something big and beautiful, and of the lost Old World value of spending time instead of always rushing to save it. Margaret Rose thinks about Joan of Arc (but not her fate) and Anne Frank (but not her fate either) and as soon as she has a plan, Margaret Rose swings into action to fight an even larger tyranny than the one she encountered at camp. She is ready to change history.





THE IMPRESSIONIST

Novel by: Hari Kunzru
Screenwriter: Sooni Taraporevala
Director: Mira Nair
Development: Fox Searchlight

The Impressionist tells the story of Pran Nath, a half white half Indian boy who learns how to bridge the enormous racial and social divides in the Raj of the 1920s, crossing from one side to another in a series of reinventions of his own personality.

Pran begins as the spoiled child of a wealthy Indian lawyer, but when news of his true parentage by an English man is revealed, he is thrust out of his home and into the dangerous life of the streets. The story follows him from his days as a street beggar to his years as a sex slave catering to the bizarre tastes of his white clients to his apprenticeship as a lab assistant to the fanatical missionary who collects skulls of members of "inferior" races and measures their cranial capacity.

Through all this Pran comes to realize that identity is a lot more fluid than many of the people he encounters like to think. After honing his chameleon-like skills, he is shocked to find that he's able to pass as an Englishman and enter the halls of Oxford University. But Pran soon discovers that his gift for manipulating surface appearances comes at a huge cost. In the end, the ultimate transformation back to his authentic self proves to be the most challenging one of all.





I KNOW WHERE BRUCE LEE LIVES

Writer:Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz, Michael Kang
Director: Open
Attachments: Wayne Wang as producer
Development : Entertainment Farm (based in Tokyo)

In this urban, action adventure story, two twelve year old boys embark upon an exciting journey when they realize that the new ice cream truck driver in their Queens neighborhood could be Bruce Lee. This story uses fantastical martial arts sequences in the tradition of Crouching Tiger and Shaolin Soccer.

Charlie, a Korean American boy being raised by his single mother, seeks a father figure in this man he believes to be Bruce Lee. While learning Jeet Kun Do and philosophy from his new friend, Charlie accidentally becomes embroiled with a dangerous Fukanese gang in Chinatown, leading him on a risky adventure which not only tests his new skills in martial arts but challenges him to come to terms with his father's absence and finally reconnect with his mother.