Happy 80th Birthday Rosemary Harris!!!

• First and foremost, a very happy birthday to the legendary Rosemary Harris who is four scores old today! Ms Harris, we hope you have a wonderful day and wish you our sincerest felicitations! As they might have said in The Coast of Utopia, s dniom razhdjenia!



• In other news, fancy becoming the next Santosh Sivan by taking an internship with his contemporaries? DNA India gives details of a one-minute film festival being held later in the year, for which entrants send in - you've guessed it - a one-minute film. The winner and runners-up will get the opportunity to work with the 'Bollywood biggies' as a result of this festival which the Before the Rains director himself has a link to:

Here is an opportunity where a miniscule one minute video recording ... can actually earn you an opportunity to work with the likes of Anurag Kashyap, Onir, Hansal Mehta, Pawan Kaul, Ramu Ramanathan and Nishikant Kamat. ... [The portal] also has Sudhir Mishra and Santosh Sivan on its members’ list.

It seems this is a nice, open-to-all competition aiming to discover some hidden talent out there:

The main purpose of the festival is to connect with budding film-makers, ask them to pick up a camera and tell a story. The main criteria to judge a film would be the subject and its final impact on the audience,” says film director Anurag Kashyap.

The icing on the cake is that you don't even need to own a camera:

The festival also makes an attempt to ensure maximum reach among the film enthusiasts, simply because you can shoot your one-minute film on almost anything, right from a cell phone to a digital camera.

The festival will be held from December 1 to December 5, 2007. Visit passionforcinema.com for full details. In the meantime, get filming!

• Something else which may be of interest to budding filmmakers is http://www.santoshsivan.com/. It is a sparse but wonderfully tranquil website presumably either run by Mr Sivan or someone interested in his work.
  


• eBay meanwhile has a Utopia soundtrack CD signed by the man himself, Mr Mark Bennett, and vocalist Utopians Felicity LaFortune and David Pittu, if you scandalously never purchased one.
  


• Last but not least, Deborah Solomon's interview with Ethan Hawke for the New York Times casually reveals the Utopian's great-uncle was none other than Tennessee Williams! Starpulse meanwhile mentions that Mr Josh Hamilton is among those being directed by Mr Hawke in Things We Want. It is interesting how many ex-Utopians have either deliberately or inadvertently paired off into other projects!