http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0907674/
http://www.cinemaclock.com/aw/crva.aw/o ... /Amal.html
AMAL:
Year 2008
Country Canada
Genre Drama
Length 1:41
Director Richie Mehta
Writer Richie Mehta
Shaun Mehta
Company Séville Pictures
Starring: Rupinder Nagra Naseeruddin Shah Seema Biswas Koel Purie Vik Sahay Roshan Seth

AMAL, a multi-layered portrait of contemporary India, follows an auto-rickshaw driver in New Delhi (Amal) who is content with his small, but vital role in life. One day he drives an eccentric billionaire (G.K. Jayaram) who, disguised as a vagabond, is searching the streets for the last morsel of humanity, and someone he can leave all his money to, and Amal's life may change forever. AMAL serves up a visual feast for audiences. Filmed on location in New Delhi, India, this modern day fable asks the important question of what success means to each individual and ultimately reveals to audiences that the poorest of men are sometimes the richest.

I saw this a few weeks ago. Very good film. See it if you get the chance.

Is it a film or just a telefilm ?? Screen looked like 16:9 with some overflow at the top & bottom and also slightly squished pic. Perhaps it's a 4:3 Telefilm. Not even a HD 16:9 Telefilm ?? It's a Canadian film made by CBC TV.

Film ending looks in-complete like Johnny Gaddar. To understand the film better or to understand the ending, perhaps perhaps we need to read the book ??

The film has an open-ended ending, in that we don't know what happens to Amal. The film is a fable meant to challenge our notions about happiness. Rana, to answer your spoiler question, he can't.

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/new ... fd89a235eb
Indian fable eyes meaning of happiness

Jay Stone, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Friday, April 18, 2008

The movies are always telling us that plucky little poor guys are happier than the corrupt big shots, a perception that young Canadian director Richie Mehta has no intention of contradicting. The twist in Amal, his breakthrough feature, is that the film takes place in India, where notions of wealth, poverty and spirit are a lot closer to the ground and, in his telling, a lot sweeter. Think of Amal as Frank Capra goes to Delhi.

Amal (played with a winning deference by Rupinder Nagra) is the driver of an auto-rickshaw, a three-wheeled contraption that scoots through traffic, although not as efficiently as the subway that is being built beneath his feet, a development that hangs over the film and lends it an extra poignancy. Amal is decent, honest, polite, kind and happy, especially when Pooja (Koel Purie), a pretty shopkeeper, is in the back seat. Amal never says anything, but you suspect that one day he will make his cautious move.

This romance of simplicity is interrupted by G.K. Jayaram (Naseeruddin Shah), who is one of those Capraesque characters we don't see much in films any more: the eccentric millionaire. Dressed like a vagrant, he is visiting various establishments around the city, harassing people, trying to cheat them, and then complaining. It turns out that he is looking for a spiritually enlightened man, someone decent and honest and so on, and when he gets a ride in the back of Amal's rickshaw, he's found his man. "You're an idiot," G.K. tells Amal, with all the affection he can muster. "You'll die broke."

Or will he? G.K. dies shortly after, and his will gives his lawyer 30 days to find a mysterious auto-rickshaw driver named Amal. The simple man is about to have all his problems solved, except insofar as he doesn't have any.

However, the hunt for Amal is more complex than that: G.K. had two sons, both eager for their inheritance, especially Vivek (Vik Sahay), who needs the money to keep a vicious loan shark at bay. Then there is G.K.'s old partner (Roshan Seth), who could share in the proceeds if he somehow didn't find Amal in the required time period.

It's a situation just set up for last-minute heroics and the kind of lessons Capra liked to impart -- he was a great one for giving rich people their comeuppance -- but Mehta is more interested in making something immediate. Adapting a short story by his brother Shaun, he turns Amal into a kind of documentary tour of an Indian city (the film was shot guerrilla style on the teeming streets of Delhi and it's alive with the sounds of commerce and complaint), and the moral serenity of one man within it.

The plot -- with its high-caste manipulators trying to get their hands on the money and its low-caste heroes who sacrifice their meagre savings to help a little girl who was hurt in a car accident -- could have been cloying, but Amal is charming rather than sentimental. Part of it is sleight of hand: money doesn't matter in the movie except when it does, and when the poor need it (for reasons of compassion rather than greed) it's rewarded, while when the rich want it, it's punished. You forgive the movie that, though, because it is a fable, and because it is so engagingly told. Richie Mehta's is an authentic new voice in Canadian cinema, and Amal feels like the start of a career worth watching.

"I was once told that the poorest of men could be the richest," the voice of G.K. tells us in the film's first scene, a sentiment that sounds like the justification for economic imperialism, but becomes, at the end, a happy truth. Money may buy happiness, but who cares if you're happy already?

Amal Rating 3 1/2

Starring: Rupinder Nagra, Koel Purie, Naseeruddin Shah
Directed by: Richie Mehta

Written by: Richie Mehta and Shaun Mehta (In English and Hindi with English subtitles)

http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolo ... a6&k=61511
Toronto filmmaker's Amal is an endearing fable
Richie Mehta travelled to India to shoot feature film
Michael D. Reid, Victoria Times Colonist
Published: Sunday, February 10, 2008

VICTORIA - It's a good thing Bart Simpson wasn't in New Delhi when Richie Mehta was filming Amal.

If Bart had yelled "Don't have a cow!" it would have fallen on deaf ears. Just ask the crew.

Mehta, 29, was determined to have a cow - a certain real one, that is - in his debut feature.
It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment - a big old cow happily helping herself to an open sack of flour in a bustling marketplace before licking her face amid a powdery mist. It was a shot he had to have - even if it meant several takes.

"It's a small detail, but it's important," says Mehta, relaxing in the lobby of the Chateau Victoria after a late-night dinner.

The Toronto-based filmmaker of Indian heritage is here to speak at Victoria Film Festival showings of his endearing modern-day fable about a disillusioned billionaire vagabond (Naseeruddin Shah) who posthumously stuns his greedy relatives by leaving his fortune to a humble auto-rickshaw driver (Rupinder Nagra) who had restored his faith in humanity.

The cow-in-the-marketplace sequence typifies the colour that enriches Mehta's warm-hearted, deliberately simple film that so winsomely captures the city's bustle and co-existence of upper caste wealth and abject poverty.

The scene was inspired by a commotion Mehta and Nagra stumbled upon in 2003 when they travelled to India to shoot a low-budget "exercise" that became Amal, his award-winning short he would expand into a feature.

"The owner comes out and he's screaming at the cow and there's nothing he can do," Mehta recalls, laughing.

"It was so funny. Things that we deem bizarre, like cows and monkeys integrated into this society that has Internet and cellphones...this is just how they live. They have to reconcile both worlds."

The film itself is based on a true-life observation made by Mehta's brother, Shaun, when he was completing his Masters studies in India. After months of taking auto-rickshaws, he was so moved by a driver who not only charged a fair price but refused to accept a tip that he wrote a short story. It became the basis for the screenplay the brothers co-wrote.

"We were just winging it," says Mehta, reflecting on filming of the short. "We said, 'Let's sit down and mine some of these themes and work hard,' and I think we struck oil."

Amal - opening nationwide in April - is racking up accolades, including a spot on the Toronto International Film Festival's Top Ten Canadian Films of 2007 list.

Although it's unabashedly sentimental, Amal is praiseworthy for how it addresses the economic disparity personified by the cantankerous tycoon and the rickshaw driver unknowingly designated as heir to the old man's fortune.

Within a fable-like structure, its theme that "sometimes the poorest of men are the richest" is dramatically conveyed.

Mehta says his approach - a blend of the conventional and the mystical - was by design.

"I wanted to make it as easy as possible for western audiences to find an entryway into this culture," he says. "It seems different in so many ways to us but I feel it's exactly the same. It's just completely visual."

He says it would be the same if a billion people were crammed into B.C. or Ontario.

"Actually, it would be worse," he says upon reflection. "There seems to be a harmony in India. If a billion people can co-exist in that chaos I think there would be rivers of blood if you were to put that somewhere else."

The film vividly captures that chaos - the begging, haggling, traffic-choked streets, roaming cattle and human altercations.

Mehta shot his movie guerilla-style, allowing for some shots that could be captured solely by himself, cinematographer Mitch Ness and his camera crew. It put them - and the audience - smack in the centre of vehicular chaos and more.

"We'd just do it. It was 'run and gun,'" he says, grinning.

To give crews a sense of Amal's milieu, they stayed in apartments in his neighbourhood rather than in hotels. "We had a whole life experience. It wasn't just us going into the streets, shooting and then leaving."

Shooting a $1-million film with 45 locations in 29 days - with Mehta fever-struck half the time - was a logistical nightmare.

One unexpected obstacle was when he filmed a scene where Shah's character exchanges money with the selfless rickshaw driver in the huge Delhi marketplace Connaught Place. He found himself scrutinized by 4,500 people who showed up hoping for a glimpse of the famous Indian actor despite filming on a Sunday morning when it was closed and there would be less traffic.

"I thought, 'He looks like a vagabond. Nobody will recognize him,'" the affable filmmaker recalled. "But they all wanted to get to him. He's like the Al Pacino of India."

When police couldn't contain the crowd, a crew member suggested they use white string as a barrier.

"It was amazing," Mehta said. "The ADs [assistant directors] held the string up and nobody would pass. It was sacred."

Despite the challenges of shooting in Delhi in November and December of 2006 when temperatures plummeted to zero at night and averaged 15 at most during the day, the stunning imagery they got made it worthwhile.

It gives the film a visual warmth that balances gritty realism with a fable-friendly mystical quality.

"There's so much fog in Delhi in winter you get this really beautiful soft light. The sun is low-hanging, and you get this mist in the air," Mehta says. "It's magic hour all the time."

http://www.thestar.com/Entertainment/article/585519
GENIES
Little-known Amal snags six Genie nominations

Feb 11, 2009 04:30 AM
Comments on this story (6)
Peter Howell
Movie Critic

Toronto has its own Slumdog Millionaire sleeper success story in Amal, a story of love and wisdom set in India that's a surprise big nominee at this year's Genie Awards.

Amal, directed by Toronto filmmaker Richie Mehta and co-written by him with his brother Shaun, received six nods in yesterday's announcement in Ottawa. The film is competing for Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor (Rupinder Nagra), Sound and Original Song ("Dr. Shiva").

It's right behind the two leading nominees for the April 4 awards at the Canada Aviation Museum in Ottawa.

Ce qu'il faut pour vivre (The Necessities of Life), Benoît Pilon's drama of a relationship forged between an Inuit hunter and an orphaned boy, received eight nominations, including Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay and Actor (Natar Ungalaaq). The movie was a semifinalist for Best Foreign-Language Film at this year's Oscars.

Another French-language film, Yves-Christian Fournier's Tout est parfait (Everything is Fine), a drama about teen suicide, received seven nominations, including Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Supporting Actor (Normand D'Amour) and Supporting Actress (Anie Pascale).

Like Slumdog Millionaire, which has become the odds-on favourite to win Best Picture at the Feb. 22 Academy Awards, Amal has risen from obscurity to greatness, beginning with its modest debut at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival.

Set in New Delhi, where most of it was filmed on a $1.5 million budget, the film tells the story of an auto-rickshaw driver, played by Nagra, who doesn't allow poverty or adversity to stop him from caring for a gravely wounded little girl.

The film has been jokingly called Slumdog Billionaire because of its surface similarities with Slumdog Millionaire. Both films involve large windfalls waiting to be claimed.

Mehta is delighted with his six Genie noms, especially since they've been spread around to so many members of his tightly knit team. Calling themselves Poor Man's Productions Ltd., they laboured for four years on a film that had its spark in a 2004 short, also called Amal and directed by Mehta.

He has no problem with the Slumdog comparisons. They certainly can't hurt Amal, which was released on DVD two weeks ago.

"The comparisons to me include contrasts," Mehta told the Toronto Star yesterday.

"Slumdog is a film that empowers faith and destiny, about a person plucked out of obscurity. Amal represents the complete polar opposite, about a person taking his own life into his hands and figuring out what to do with it."

Steven Bray, the film's producer, said he hopes the attention to Amal will prompt a theatrical re-release. The movie went to theatres last August and did steady business across Canada for 2 1/2 months, but has had to work for every ticket sold.

Another sign of how well Amal is doing at the Genies is that it's tied for six nominations with Passchendaele, the big-budget drama that Paul Gross wrote, directed and starred in, and that had been expected to dominate the awards. Passchendaele nominations include Best Picture and Actor (Gross), but the film was passed over for Director and Original Screenplay.

Two other films received six nominations apiece but no picture nod: Jeremy Podeswa's Fugitive Pieces and Léa Pool's Maman est chez le coiffeur (Mommy Is at the Hairdresser's).

As is often the case with the Genies, nominations went to Quebec films that have yet to open in the rest of Canada.

These include this year's nominations leaders, Ce qu'il faut pour vivre (The Necessities of Life) and Tout est parfait (Everything Is Fine), neither of which even made it to TIFF.

But the Genies seem to have gone deeper this year in seeking out quality work, even if it didn't add up to an abundance of nominations.

The critically lauded immigrant drama Heaven on Earth by Toronto's Deepa Mehta (no relation to Richie Mehta) received nods for Best Original Screenplay and Actress (Preity Zinta).

Kristin Booth, the standout member of the ensemble cast in the kinky comedy Young People F---ing, earned a Supporting Actress nom.

Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, meanwhile, earned a Best Documentary nomination for a film that is anything but a straight doc.

In an alternate universe, Heaven on Earth, Young People F---ing and My Winnipeg might have been sharing Best Picture nomination laurels with Amal. But at least they were noticed.