Didn't raise asset naming issue to gain favour: Rishi Kapoor

New Delhi, May 10: While people across the country have been spending a lot of time at home owing to the lockdown, superstar Shah Rukh Khan on Saturday provided a unique platform for all the aspiring filmmakers to produce some 'fun, creative and... spooky' video.

The 54-year-old actor shared a statement on Instagram, detailing about the opportunity for the filmmakers to channel their inner "filmmaking ghost to make a scary indoor film with an element of horror in it."

Taking it to the captions, the 'Don' actor wrote: "Since we've all got a bit of time on our hands in quarantine, thought I can get us all to work a bit... in a fun, creative and... spooky way!"

In the post, titled with a hashtag 'SpookSRK,' the actor has listed down the rules to be followed while making the video and shared the email link to submit their work.

The 'Dilwale' actor also announced that the selected "three winners" will get a chance to video call the star himself.

Wrapping the post on a lighter note, he added: "I will be sending in my film as well...P.S - Ghosts are welcome to send their entries too."

This comes a day after the first trailer launch of Shah Rukh's new Netflix horror series 'Betaal'.

SRK's Red Chillies Entertainment is producing the horror-thriller. The new series also stars Vineet Kumar, Aahana Kumra, Suchitra Pillai, Jitendra Joshi, Manjiri Pupala, and Syna Anand.

London, Feb 12: Oscar-winning British director Steve McQueen is returning to his art roots with a series of short films at London's Tate Modern art gallery, offering a sensory exploration of black identity.

McQueen, who became the first black director to win the best picture Academy Award in 2014 for "12 Years a Slave", is now based between London and Amsterdam and is focused on championing diversity in the film industry.

Visitors to his new exhibition will be greeted by "Static", a film of New York's Statue of Liberty, scrutinising the iconic symbol from every possible angle at very close range against a deafening backdrop of the helicopter from where the footage was filmed.

"What interests Steve is our view of the world, how humans are trying to represent Liberty," said Fiontan Moran, assistant curator of the exhibition.

"7th Nov, 2001" features a still shot of a body while McQueen's cousin Marcus tells of how he accidentally killed his brother, a particularly traumatic experience for the artist.

"Western Deep" is another visceral work, giving a sense through sights and sounds in an interactive installation of the experiences of miners in South Africa, following them to the bottom of the mine.

"Ashes", meanwhile, is a tribute to a young fisherman from Grenada, the island where McQueen's family originated.

The images of beauty and sweetness filmed from his boat are tragically reversed on the other side of the projection screen, which shows a grave commissioned by McQueen for the eponymous young fisherman, who was killed by drug traffickers.

African-American singer, actor and civil rights activist Paul Robeson (1898-1976) is honoured in "End Credits".

The film shows censored FBI documents detailing the agency's surveillance of Robeson, read by a voice-over artist, for five hours.

"He is... testing the limits of how people can be documented in an era of mass surveillance," said Moran.

In a similarly militant vein, the exhibition features the sculpture "Weight", which was first shown in the prison cell where the writer and playwright Oscar Wilde was imprisoned.

It depicts a golden mosquito net draped over a metal prison bed frame, addressing the theme of confinement and the power of the imagination to break free.

The show runs alongside an exhibition of McQueen's giant portraits of London school classes, many of which appeared on the streets of London last year.

"I remember my first school trip to Tate when I was an impressionable eight-year-old, which was really the moment I gained an understanding that anything is possible," said McQueen, adding it was "where in some ways my journey as an artist first began".

He recently told the Financial Times newspaper the difference between his art films and his feature films was that the former were poetry, the latter like a novel.

"Poetry is condensed, precise, fragmented," he said. "The novel is the yarn".

The exhibition opens on February 13 and runs until May 11.

Mumbai, Jan 4: After the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur constituted a panel to decide whether legendary poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz's poem 'Hum Dekhenge' is offensive to Hindu sentiments, filmmaker Shoojit Sircar had a cryptic take on the burning controversy.

"Best time for the rich & small businesses to make money as most of the population are engaged with a revolutionary poet named Faiz," Sircar said in a tweet.

The poem, penned down by the iconic poet in 1979, came into limelight again recently during the protests against CAA and NRC in IIT Kanpur.

Earlier on Thursday, senior lyricist Javed Akhtar rejected the claims about the poem being 'anti-Hindu'.

IIT Kanpur on Thursday had set up a committee to look into the issue.

The move came after a complaint that the students who took out a peaceful march in the campus on December 17 against the Citizenship Amendment Act and in solidarity with Jamia Millia Islamia students, sung it as a mark of protest, which hurt the sentiments of other communities.

The CAA grants citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis, Buddhists and Christians who faced religious persecution in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh and came to India on or before December 31, 2014.