Dharmendra, Shabana Azmi and Mira Nair Honored With Padma Bhushan.

kloppwtj:

Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Art Films and the Nollywood Video Revolution
African cinema in the 1960s originated mainly from Francophone countries. It resembled the art cinema of contemporary Europe and relied on support from the French film industry and the French state….

DirecTV satellite cable provider has ordered 10 episodes for the original cop drama Rogue series starring Mission Impossible 2 and Crash‘s Thandie Newton, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

From Entertainment One Television (eOne) and Greenroom Entertainment, the new series marks DirecTV’s first drama project produced exclusively for its customers. Rogue follows in the footsteps of dramas Friday NightLights and Damages, which aired on broadcast and cable networks before making the jump to DirecTV.

“There’s an excitement in the hallways of DirecTV as Rogue will be the first original series on the Audience Network that will be built from the ground up with the specific goal to provide DirecTV customers with a premium entertainment experience they can’t get anywhere else,” said Chris Long, svp entertainment and production, DirecTV.

Rogue centers on a morally and emotionally conflicted cop, Grace (Newton), who is tormented by the possibility that her own actions contributed to her son’s death. Grace’s search for the truth is further complicated by her forbidden relationship with the crime boss who may have played a role in the crime.

Production on Rogue will begin in August to premiere in summer 2013 on DirecTV’s Audience Network.

You’ll be seeing more of Regina King as Detective Lydia Adams on TNT’sSouthland because the show has just been picked up for a 5th season. The long-expected renewal of Southland was announced this morning in a message from TNT head of programming Michael Wright:

“I’m proud today to announce that TNT has ordered 10 episodes for a fifth season of Southland, scheduled to begin in February 2013.”

Every season critics and fans alike have championed TNT’s Southland as one of best dramas on television. This year, the show has not only solidified its impassioned fan base, but also picked up some new young-adult devotees along the way.

In its fourth season, Southland centered its focus on four primary characters played by four outstanding thespians:

• Michael Cudlitz as Officer John Cooper, who bounced back from surgery and an addiction to painkillers only to be put under the microscope of a new partner.

• Shawn Hatosy as Officer Sammy Bryant, who chose to give up being a detective and return tothe streets as a uniformed patrolman.

• Regina King as Detective Lydia Adams, who faces probably the biggest challenge of her life, becoming a mother.

We’re excited to see Regina continue in her role as Detective Adams on the show so, congrats Regina!

It was a close call late last night but thankfully no injuries were reported; Tyler Perry Studios caught on fire in Atlanta!

The Atlanta Fire Rescue Department released a statement, claiming the

fire was brought under control around 9:45 PM EST just an hour after fire fighters arrived.

According to the statement, the blaze was so severe a fourth alarm had to be called.  It was also reported that one of the buildings had partially collapsed but we don’t have all of the facts yet.

The cause of the fire is still under investigation.

As an actor in Lost, he was watched worldwide. As a child, he was a ‘black Oliver Twist’, farmed out for fostering to a white family. Now Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje is making a film of his extraordinary life story.

The name Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje is not one that slips easily off the tongue but it’s worth mastering because we’re likely to be hearing a lot more of it in the future. Followers of the wilfully perplexing American fantasy series Lost may recall its owner as Mr Eko, the former drug lord turned fake priest who was killed by the Man in Black, otherwise known as the Monster. Or perhaps not.

Some will know him as Simon Adebisi, the intimidating African convict in the cult HBO prison series Oz; others may recognise his contributions to films such as Congo and The Bourne Identity; and no doubt his role as an American spy in the forthcoming BBC-HBO series Hunted will further raise his profile. But it may well be as the screenwriter and film director of his own life story that Akinnuoye-Agbaje becomes a name to remember.

Armed with an Annenberg Film Fellowship grant, Akinnuoye-Agbaje has been working on the film for several years, developing the story at the Sundance Institute Directors and Screenwriters Labs. A read-through of the script by a cast including David Harewood and Marc Warren became one of the most talked about events at the recent Sundance London festival.

Entitled Farming, it refers to the practice of handing out children to informal fostering that many Nigerian parents followed in 1960s and 1970s Britain. Akinnuoye-Agbaje was one such case. In 1967, when he was six weeks old, his parents – a Nigerian couple studying in London – gave him to a white working-class couple in Tilbury, then a fiercely insular dockside community. Six months later, the Tilbury dockers led strikes in support of Enoch Powell.

Akinnuoye-Agbaje hopes to start shooting the film later this year. It’s a neo-Dickensian tale of hardship, abandonment and solidarity, a kind of black Oliver Twist for the postwar immigration era. Now a powerfully built 44-year-old man, he recalls the vulnerability of his childhood with such a generous mixture of humour and understanding that it’s difficult to keep in mind that he came through circumstances that would have crushed the strongest of spirits.

At times his foster parents had 10 or more African children living with them, including Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s two sisters. “It was a strange relationship,” he recalls of his feelings for his foster parents. “It was one of love because that’s all that I knew, and that’s what love is: you accept people for what they are. If I’m honest, it was very tough. My father was a lorry driver, very rarely at home. The house was run by my mother, and because there were 10 or so kids, there was no time for individual attention. It was about survival. It was about where the next meal was coming from. We had to go out and nick things to get it. So there wasn’t any love in the sense of hugs or anything like that: there was just no room for it. The only haven I had was sleeping behind the sofa in the corner of the room – that was where I could get some kind of peace.”…

Akinnuoye-Agbaje is indeed a star inside and out, but the hardest and most triumphant role he’ll ever play is the one he was handed by his parents as a baby of just six weeks.