SHIFT is once again accepting submissions for their world wide, digital short film festival. We’ve featured them for several years in a row now, and the results are always impressive!

From their blog:

Online magazine SHIFT presents DOTMOV Festival 2012, a digital film festival aiming to discover talented creators and provide them with an opportunity to show their works. Screening was took place in 20 places, Hong Kong, London, Stockholm, New York, India, Brazil etc besides Japan last year. Works submitted from all over the world will be screened throughout the world venues from November 2012. Last year’s total

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Minority actors are typically sidelined and cast in stereotypical, over the top racial roles — especially when they are Asians on American screens. The Asian guy in Glee plays The Asian guy in Glee. The comedienne, Margaret Cho, jokes that when she was growing up she had no Asian role models to aspire towards onscreen, except the extras on M*A*S*H. What about when the tables are turned?

As it turns out, mainstream Indian cinema has a certain niche for Mandatory White Men (MWM). There are bars in South Bombay that you can go to to get Mandatory White …

Any Hindi movie that has the word sex in it is guaranteed to be a major departure from typical Bollywood fare so I trundled over to see this as part of the London Indian Film Festival (it’s also available on DVD). Sadly, the departure hasn’t gone far enough. Love, Sex, aur Dhoka (which means Love, Sex, and Betrayal) is in theory an interesting concept: the lives of three pairs of people connected by a camera. The first is a pair of young lovers who meet while filming a final project for film school; the second a love affair involving two …

Say the word “Bollywood,” and what does it evoke? Probably color-coordinated dancing girls, melodrama, and a sinking feeling at the thought of having to spend the next four hours of your life watching a movie.

Luckily for us, Luck By Chance (2009) is different.

Firstly, it gently insists that the name should not be “Bollywood” – a derivative term that suggests that Hindi films cannot be taken seriously unless they associate themselves with American films – but “the Hindi film industry.” The story revolves around an actor, played by Zoya Akhtar’s brother Farhan Akhtar, who’s trying to become a star …