Ackland Film Forum: “Om Shanti Om” (2007)

A murder-mystery and romance combine in this Indian cult film that caps off our Global Cult Cinema series.

Om Shanti Om
Farah Khan, 2007, India, 2h 42m

Introduction by Priya Shanker, UNC-Wilmington

FILM SYNOPSIS

In the 1970s, Om, an aspiring actor, is murdered, but is immediately reincarnated into the present day. He attempts to discover the mystery of his demise and find Shanti, the love of his previous life.

TICKETS

Free tickets are available at the Varsity Theatre, 123 E. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill

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ABOUT THE GLOBAL CULT CINEMA SERIES

From Rocky Horror Picture Show to The Big Lebowski, cult classics are movies that become objects of adulation for their most dedicated fans. While some cult classics are good movies by conventional standards, others are famous precisely because the director was more interested in having a good time than winning awards. In this series, we’ll show four global cult classics (or soon to-be classics), including Çetin İnanç’s 1982 science-fiction action film Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (“The Man Who Saved the World”), which infamously “borrowed” special effects sequences from Star Wars and Lo Wei’s 1972 film The Big Boss, which made Bruce Lee an international star. Tears of the Black Tiger pays homage to Thai action films and melodramas of the 1950s, crossing that indelible line between reverence and parody. Om Shanti Om also pays tribute to a golden era of filmmaking, only in this case it’s concerned with recreating the over-the-top dance numbers of 1970s Bollywood filmmaking.

The Spring 2022 Global Cult Cinema series, co-organized by the Ackland Art Museum and the Film Studies Program in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, is presented in connected with an installation in Ackland Upstairs, the Museum’s second floor gallery featuring short term displays of works being used in conjunction with university classes. This semester, visitors can find examples of posters from the Ackland’s collection on display for Research Methods in Film Studies: Histories of Moviegoing.