Danish Renzu’s THE ILLEGAL and Seema Desai’s TINDEY win big at the 3rd New Jersey Indian and International Film Festival

The Third edition of the New Jersey Indian International Film Festival (NJIIFF), was held virtually with screening of films via online platform Movie Saints. With a large number of audience watching it online across the globe, the closing and award ceremony took place live. The three day festival that screened about 40 films from different cultures, countries including short, feature and documentary had some interesting winners.

In the shortfilm section actor Joseph Lloyd Lopez won for his performance in AMERICAN HATE and Ashwini Kalsekar of Golmaal fame for her stunning performance in the film TINDEY. Deepak Reddy was awarded the best director for his short film MANASANAMAHA.

The film deals with the subject of A Young man muses on the nature of love, recounting three relationships from his past. The girls in his life resemble three different seasons, namely Chaitra (Spring), Varsha (Monsoon) and Seeta (Winter). Filmmaker Seema Desai’s TINDEY won best short film award at the festival.

Watch the teaser of The Illegal here:

THE ILLEGAL directed by Danish Renzu won two awards at the festival. Danish was awarded the best director for the film and THE ILLEGAL won BEST FILM award too. Archana Pradeep won the best female actor for Malayam film in KATHAAH@8, from Singapore, which is probably the first anthology of its kind – 8 films in 8 (Indian regional) languages, and Pratik Gandhi win best male actors for his Gujarati Feature Film DHUNKI.

Two entires from IRAN had their share of win, EVEN AN HOUR LATER won best short of short film award and THE OTHER won Best of Best Films Award (Festival’s Choice). Other winners at festival are from films PIED PIPER, KAANBHATT and THE CHERNOBYL SAGA- IRISH BUTTER CASE OF INDIA won best documentary film award.

Watch Tindey here:

Festival Director Hemant Pandya was very overwhelmed by the kind of support he got from the filmmakers who participated in the festival. He said, “2020 was very tough, due to pandemic situation we had to postponed our film festival twice, finally we took decision to do it online, and with help of Movie Saints we were able to pulpit though”. He added “I am going to make sure that NJIIFF will get bigger and even better with each passing year. I am thankful to all the filmmakers, the people of New Jersey, media supporters, Mana TV International, Radio Zindagi. Vista India Digital Media and my sponsors for supporting the festival”.