The Front Row with Anupama Chopra

Ms. Anupama Chopra, renowned film critic, responded positively to Grade 12 English students’ initiative and engaged in an interaction with students from Grades 10 to 11. Sharing a range of her experiences in journalism, specifically understanding cinema, she enlightened us on story line, dialogue, casting, humour and overall impact among several other factors.

Ms. Chopra was was lively, humorous and grabbed the young audience’s attention with her anecdotes and frankness. Being mostly a student-hosted event, there were prepared questions from IB English students of Language, Performance and Literature batches. She was very receptive of the questions and answered them without hesitation or uncertainty. She was sportive to take the rapid fire question round too. She also passed the instant review test where she was shown a 3 minute movie and had to review it immediately!

The questions varied from maintaining her respectfulness in criticizing movies to, how many movies she gets to watch in a week. She responded with detail and humour, keeping the audience engaged with discussions on current films that we are exposed to. The entire session was light-hearted and interactive as she gave us an idea of journalism (being an alumnus of Northwestern University) and how it has helped her shape her career and skills. We got an idea of what the procedure she follows before a numerical rating and qualitative review is given. She prefers the qualitative review but was candid in admitting that most users just go for the rating.

The audience was bustling with questions and exceeded the time limit we originally estimated. They asked her about how to balance friendship and objective criticism; interviewing leading figures in the industry, censorship, credibility of reviews and the current state of journalism in India. It was a different experience offered to the students, involving something that almost everyone could relate to – the movies.