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IIFA Awards in New York will be the biggest: Andre Timmins

The much-loved International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) 2017 awards night will take place in the city that never sleeps - New York. This is the first time the event is being held in the city. NYC is the host of the highly anticipated 18th Edition of the IIFA Weekend and Awards ceremony night.

The extravagant celebration of Indian cinema will take place on July 14 and15, at the Metlife Stadium (known globally as the Rolls Royce of venues).
Andre Timmins, Director, Wizcraft International and the producer and creator of IIFA told Khaleej Times over the phone that this will be the biggest IIFA event so far, "We will create a collaboration between Bollywood and the Hollywood biggies like Netflix, Amazon, etc. We want to make Bollywood more global hence we chose New York as a hosting venue."
"The whole idea is to capitalise on the Hollywood market by getting amazon and Netflix on board with us. People are migrating to Amazon and Netflix internationally. Amazon has done work with Farhan Akhtar, Karan Johar, Prasoon Joshi in the past. I think our stars will migrate to that space as well because they have the opportunity to produce good content. New York is the right place for us and we are already getting a great response," he added.
The IIFA Voting Weekend took place recently in Mumbai where members of the Indian film industry showed their support to IIFA as they came forward to vote for their peers.
Andre told us the Indian film industry will make sure that NYC is going to witness 48 hours of non-stop excitement and entertainment like no other during IIFA, "From the content perspective, we are doing a lot of collaboration. We are going to bring in the big stars from Indian cinema. There will be music workshops, massive events at Times Square which will be free to the public. We are also expecting many Hollywood celebrities to join us for the star-studded celebration."
The IIFA weekend has hosted many movie premieres in the past and Andre revealed that quite a few Bollywood movies are fighting for space to premiere at the prestigious festival.
Over the years, many international celebrities like Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan, Thora Birch, Kylie Minogue, John Travolta, Hilary Swank and Kevin Spacey have graced IIFA.  Apart from Bollywood biggies, South Indian movie industry superstars like Rajnikanth, Nagarjuna, Kamal Haasan are also expected to attend the ceremony. Tickets will go on sale  starting April 19.

Why Dangal has been left out?
"Is it true that Dangal has not been nominated? At IIFA, we do not have a jury. Forms are sent out to various production houses and they send it back to us with details of their movies. We then put those entries out. Dangal did not send an entry. We would love Dangal to part of IIFA. We love Aamir Khan and the new girls who made their debut in the movie. Dangal is a fantastic film. It's sad that it is not part of IIFA," Andre said.

The two-day IIFA itinerary
Day 1 - IIFA Weekend press conference and IIFA Rocks green carpet and IIFA Rocks main event
Day 2 - the IIFA Awards green carpet and presentation of awards.
arti@khaleejtimes.com