Bandit Queen star Seema Biswas charmed New York crowds with her portrayal of a rambunctious cook serving a Canadian couple in New Delhi, clinching the best actress award at the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival (MIAAC).

Wonderful, is how filmmaker Mani Ratnam described Cooking With Stella, which has been directed by photojournalist Dilip Mehta.

Stella, an audacious pilferer but a brilliant cook, sets about teaching the husband Michael the secrets of Indian cuisine. But the ultimate objective of the middle-aged woman is to make a buck.

While the film is light hearted, it explores the troubling relationship between the master and domestic help, which India struggles with. "We deny them their identity. You do not reconcile yourself to it... you are troubled by it," said Mehta.

MIAAC is a film festival for non-mainstream Indian cinema from different parts of the world, which cannot find a venue to be screened.

"The smaller films, once it comes out, shines much more than a mainstream film does because its come out of the blue with much more promise of future. Tomorrow the small filmmaker will become the big filmmaker and thats how it goes," Ratnam told PTI.

The Raavan director also picked up a Special Achievement award on behalf of music composer AR Rahmanwho could not attend but sent his thanks via a video message.

The tenth anniversary of the festival was attended by several prominent personalities including Salman Rushdie, Madhur Jaffrey, Suketu Mehta, Rahul Bose, Deepti Naval, Mira Nair, Seema Biswas and Sarita Choudhry. My Japanese Wife, which stars Bose, was another film that endeared itself to the audience here. Director Aparna Sen tells the story of an arithmetic teacher living in the Sunderbans and a Japanese girl in Yokohama who fall in love and get married solely through the letters they write each other for over 15 years.

"I think it's a wonderful performance and a touching story. I'm not a big fan of the Bombay commercial cinema. I prefer to watch films like this," Rushdie told PTI.

The author, however, didn't reveal much about his own project - a film on his best selling book Midnight's Children to be directed by Oscar nominated director Deepa Mehta. "We're getting there... even with books I'm very reluctant to talk about work in progress. We've got the script done, we're almost caste, we're putting the money together and then we'll have a lot of time to talk about it," he said.

Even Ratnam, who is reportedly working on a film about two kingdoms in South India, was cryptic about his new project.

"Don't believe everything," he said, laughing. "We're still on a scripts stage so we'll have to see how it goes. But the filmmaker was much more candid about his thoughts on New York City, which he described as one of his favourite places. "I love it," said Ratnam.