The buzz preceding New York's Indian film festival was strong enough to pre-sell $500 tickets to the opening night screening of Today's Special, helmed by Aasif Mandvi.

The popularity of the festival reflects the maturing of the affluent population of 2.5 million Indian Americans. "It is wonderful to see the festival grow as the community itself grows more confident, more diverse and more original," said Booker prize winning author Salman Rushdie.

The Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival (MIAAC), which kicks off on Wednesday, offers up over 50 films the organizers describe as "Bollywood, not Bollywood at all and something in between."

Tandoori tale
Mandvi's Today's Special, a lively New York food comedy, stars Naseeruddin Shah and Madhur Jaffrey."Asif spent 10 years working on the screenplay. We kept doing readings; I kept playing his mother and we aged in the process. It was a heck of a journey to make this film," Jaffrey told The Mag while lunching on a chicken tikka roll at a sneak-peak of the film at New York's Aicon Gallery.

Lillian LaSalle, producer of Today's Special, said the "feel-good family drama" about a second-gen Indian-American chef trained in haute cuisine who is forced to take over his family's failing tandoori joint would be released in US theatres in 2010. The film is likely to spark buyer interest at the festival.

This year's festival lineup includes an eclectic mix of contemporary Indian cinema, Bengali films and a Kashmir sidebar. As the film festival continues to seek new styles of filmmaking, the programmers are also hoping to stumble across the next great filmmaker.

This time the festival places a bold bet on Santosh Sivan whose film Tahaan has been selected as the festival's centrepiece. In Sivan's film, set in Kashmir, an eight-year-old boy is asked to commit a terrorist act. Last year, this slot was occupied by Fox Searchlight's Slumdog Millionaire which chose the festival as the place for the New York premiere of the film.

Kashmiri backdrop
"Tahaan is a stunning, fable-like film with universal appeal for family audiences, art house audiences -- really anyone who loves beautiful cinema and storytelling" said Eric Beckman, President of GKIDS Entertainment and the US distributor of Tahaan.

"Sivan's cinematography captures the beauty of Kashmir with shimmering lakes, snow-capped mountains and Sufi singers, providing a fairlytale backdrop as the film explores the regional conflict through the eyes of a young child," added Beckman.

The festival also highlights Sona Jain's For Real which shows a six-year-old child fighting desperately to keep her parents together. "The little girl uses fantasy to deal with reality. It is unusual to see a normal movie about normal people with normal problems. It hurts even more," says Hollywood actress Sarita Choudhury, who plays the troubled child's mother.

Gifted actor Adil Hussain, who plays the male lead in the film, holds up his end of the drama. "The material is very sensitive. It deals with a man-woman relationship but the real impact is on a child. It's a movie adults must watch," said Hussain who also teaches at the National School of Drama (NSD) in Delhi and the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune.

American filmmakers
The festival also showcases American film-makers talking about mixed marriages. Actor and musician Todd Giglio and his childhood friend Christopher Springer maxed out their credit cards and drained their savings to make a movie structured loosely on their own lives. Drawing With Chalk is a mid-life, coming-of-age story.

The filmmakers not only live a few miles apart in Westchester County, but are married to two Indian sisters. It comes as no surprise then that the film's protagonist Jay, a wannabe rock star, is married to an Indian girl called Jasmin (played by the ebullient Pooja Kumar). Jay struggles to balance his dreams with his responsibilities to his wife Jasmin and son Bryan.

"The film was inspired by our own struggles, but is not autobiographical," says Giglio, 40, who roughed it out in Hell's Kitchen as a young actor trying to make it in New York. He has directed and acted in Drawing With Chalk.

Other festival highlights include the Lavrenti Lopes starrer Kissing Miss Jones, a Woody Allensque film about a kiss which changes everything, Bollywood Beats and The Endless Wait.