Miss Bollywood UK announces semi-finalists for 2010
9 June 2010
Image courtesy: missbollywooduk.co.uk
Fifty semi finalists were announced for Miss Bollywood UK, a beauty pageant for young women wanting to get a foothold into the industry, last week.
Lord Zia Choudhury, CEO and founder of the one-year-old event, says, “We’ve received thousands of applications this year, almost double of what we got last year. The competition is not just for Indian girls, we encourage all ethnicities to come forward and participate, because in the recent years, a lot of British and European girls have played substantial roles in commercial Hindi films.”
The semi finals of the competition will be taking place between June and July and the finals will be taking place in October 2010.
Lord Choudhury himself is a model and actor and has worked in a few Hindi films. “With my connections in Bollywood, I get a lot of producers and directors interested in the competition and so I make sure that the girl winning the crown does get her shot with at least one film.”
Ramanpreet Bains, who had applied but didn’t make it thinks the competition is down to just looks. “If it’s a competition, where the winner will get to act in a Bollywood film, why don’t they have a talent contest to decide?” she said.
London gets another visitor from Bollywood -920
16 June 2010
his film, Patiala House, last week
Image courtesy: bollyspice.com
To prepare for his role in the film, which stars Andrew Symonds and Dirk Nannes and is about cricket, he has been seen practicing his bowling skills at Trent Bridge all week.
Patiala House is one of the many Hindi movies being shot in UK this year. Filming Coordinator, Film London, Melinda Knowles says “We have seen a dramatic increase in the number of Indian productions filming in London – part of the reason of this rise is fashion, UK seems to be one of the popular locations to set stories at the moment and in part because of the tax breaks that are available to productions filming here.”
Siddharth Singh, a London-based Bollywood blogger says that a lot of it is to do with aspiration. “The idea is to cash in on the fantasy that many Indians share to be in foreign locations like London. So it becomes a win-win situation for the producers—they get their exotic locations and the audiences do not feel alienated at all.”
The aspiration does well for the tourism department too. Last year, the British film authorities had unveiled a Bollywood locations map, which highlights the places where Bollywood movies have been shot, to encourage tourism in London, which can be seen here.
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