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23rd Kolkata International Film Festival ready to welcome world cinema (Curtain Raiser)

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Kolkata, Nov 9 (IANS) The 23rd edition of the Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF), India’s second oldest film festival, rolls back into the eastern metropolis on Friday, welcoming world cinema, attracting the finest of talents and embracing fresh cinematic experiments.

Beginning with a star-studded inaugural on Friday, the gala event, hosted by the West Bengal government, will screen an assemblage of 143 films spanning 53 countries under 16 different categories till November 17.

Stars Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan will be present at the inaugural ceremony. Tamil film icon Kamal Haasan and filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt are also slated to attend the ceremony, to be presided over by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

Britain will be the focus country this year in commemoration of the UK-India Year of Culture 2017 with as many as 13 of its films part of the week-long celeberation.

Headlining the British highlight in a retrospective are six films of acclaimed English filmmaker Michael Winterbottom. “Welcome to Sarajevo”, “Trishna”, “The Claim” are part of the film fest roster.

“Lady Macbeth”, “Adult Life Skills” and “Sea Sorrow” are slotted in the contemporary British films while the classics is dominated by David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes” among others.

Icons of Indian cinema Tom Alter, Om Puri and Ramananda Sengupta will be remembered through rich tributes.

Three films will be showcased in memory of cinematographer Sengupta (“Headmaster”) and actors Tom Alter (“Shatranj Ke Khiladi”) and Om Puri (“Sadgati”).

Promising the best of world cinema, the organisers have brought Iranian film maker Mostafa Taghizadeh’s “Yellow” (2017) and French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s “The Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company”.

“Yellow” opens the festival.

The screening of “The Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company” is significant as this will be the film’s first Indian screening. The 1986 film, made for television, was restored and released in October this year in France.

A special tribute section has been devoted to 10 well-known filmmakers such as award-winning Turkish director Yesim Ustaoglu (“Clair Obscur”), French auteurs Arnaud Desplechin (“Ismael’s Ghosts” starring Marion Cotillard) and Claire Denis (Juliette Binoche headlined “Bright Sunshine In”) as also South Korean director and Cannes veteran Hong Sang-soo (“The Day After”).

Stressing on innovation, this year the fest introduces Indian languages competition category as also ‘Unheard India: Rare Indian Languages’ section featuring eight films in as many languages (Monpa, Konkani, Kodava, Bodo, Dogri, Maithili, Khasi and Chakma).

The list includes Manju Borah’s “Songs of the Horned Owl” (Bodo) and Ahsan Majid’s “Sonam”, the first feature made in Monpa dialect of the Indo-Tibetan branch of languages.

To give a fillip to the Bengali film industry, the festival will host the premiere of three Bengali films including acclaimed playwright and West Bengal IT Minister Bratya Basu-starrer “Baranda”.

A package of 12 National Award-winning films (“Bisorjon”, “Dashakriya” and others) has been pegged as “must-watch” by the organisers.

A contemporary Moroccan cinema package encapsulating six films including “The 5th String” — which won special mention of the jury honour at the National Film Festival of Morocco, Tangier, 2011 — is also in the programme.

Six films of Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, one of Thailand’s most celebrated working directors will be screened. Three Thailand National Film Association Awards winner “Fun Bar Karaoke” is among them.

As for the competitive section, the women’s director’s competition has been replaced with ‘Innovation in Moving Images’ with a prize money of Rs 51 lakh for the best film and Rs 21 lakh for the best director.

On schedule are no less than 14 films including German-Austrian venture “Uncle Vanya”, Bangladeshi filmmaker Abu Sayeed’s “Death of A Poet”, and Argentinian outing “A Sort of A Family”.

In a toast to cinematic technique, an exposition of original equipment used by the Lumiere brothers, auteur Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak has been planned.

The Satyajit Ray Memorial Lecture will be given by Rachel Dwyer, professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema at SOAS, University of London.

A total of 93 foreign language films will be showcased through the festival and 50 from India.

The films would be screened across 12 venues in the city.

–IANS
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Casino Days Reveal Internal Data on Most Popular Smartphones

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CasinoDays India

International online casino Casino Days has published a report sharing their internal data on what types and brands of devices are used to play on the platform by users from the South Asian region.

Such aggregate data analyses allow the operator to optimise their website for the brands and models of devices people are actually using.

The insights gained through the research also help Casino Days tailor their services based on the better understanding of their clients and their needs.

Desktops and Tablets Lose the Battle vs Mobile

The primary data samples analysed by Casino Days reveal that mobile connections dominate the market in South Asia and are responsible for a whopping 96.6% of gaming sessions, while computers and tablets have negligible shares of 2.9% and 0.5% respectively.

CasinoDays India

The authors of the study point out that historically, playing online casino was exclusively done on computers, and attribute thе major shift to mobile that has unfolded over time to the wide spread of cheaper smartphones and mobile data plans in South Asia.

“Some of the reasons behind this massive difference in device type are affordability, technical advantages, as well as cheaper and more obtainable internet plans for mobiles than those for computers,” the researchers comment.

Xiaomi and Vivo Outperform Samsung, Apple Way Down in Rankings

Chinese brands Xiaomi and Vivo were used by 21.9% and 20.79% of Casino Days players from South Asia respectively, and together with the positioned in third place with a 18.1% share South Korean brand Samsung dominate the market among real money gamers in the region.

 

CasinoDays India

Cupertino, California-based Apple is way down in seventh with a user share of just 2.29%, overshadowed by Chinese brands Realme (11.43%), OPPO (11.23%), and OnePlus (4.07%).

Huawei is at the very bottom of the chart with a tiny share just below the single percent mark, trailing behind mobile devices by Motorola, Google, and Infinix.

The data on actual phone usage provided by Casino Days, even though limited to the gaming parts of the population of South Asia, paints a different picture from global statistics on smartphone shipments by vendors.

Apple and Samsung have been sharing the worldwide lead for over a decade, while current regional leader Xiaomi secured their third position globally just a couple of years ago.

Striking Android Dominance among South Asian Real Money Gaming Communities

The shifted market share patterns of the world’s top smartphone brands in South Asia observed by the Casino Days research paper reveal a striking dominance of Android devices at the expense of iOS-powered phones.

On the global level, Android enjoys a comfortable lead with a sizable 68.79% share which grows to nearly 79% when we look at the whole continent of Asia. The data on South Asian real money gaming communities suggests that Android’s dominance grows even higher and is north of the 90% mark.

Among the major factors behind these figures, the authors of the study point to the relative affordability of and greater availability of Android devices in the region, especially when manufactured locally in countries like India and Vietnam.

“And, with influencers and tech reviews putting emphasis on Android devices, the choice of mobile phone brand and OS becomes easy; Android has a much wider range of products and caters to the Asian online casino market in ways that Apple can’t due to technical limitations,” the researchers add.

The far better integration achieved by Google Pay compared to its counterpart Apple Pay has also played a crucial role in shaping the existing smartphone market trends.

 

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