Also in Thursday evening's round-up of news briefs, the Academy names a director for the 85th Oscars telecast. And a slew of Venice and Toronto titles find homes, leading them to U.S. theaters in the coming months.
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Indian-born filmmaker Mira Nair said that 9/11 formed part of the inspiration for her latest film, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which kicked off the Venice Film Festival Wednesday evening. Just days before the attacks, Nair won the festival's top prize, the Golden Lion, for her much praised Monsoon Wedding and she left the fabled Italian city for the Toronto International Film Festival to promote the film when the attacks happened. Like other New York residents, she was stranded in the Canadian city following the tragic event, taking her a week to get back to NYC and her husband and son. When she did make it back, she felt an "otherness" in the post-9/11 period, a theme she explores in her latest feature.
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The world premiere of international political thriller The Reluctant Fundamentalist will launch the Venice Film Festival August 29th. The film is based on the best-selling novel of the same name about a young Pakistani man chancing corporate success on Wall Street, but becomes embroiled in a conflict between his American Dream, a hostage crisis, and the enduring call of his family's homeland. The feature will screen out of competition stars Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson, Kiefer Sutherland, Liev Schreiber, Martin Donovan, Om Puri, Shabana Azmi, Haluk Bilginer and Meesha Shafi.
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