TIFF 2018 Day 9 round-up: Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota, Meeting Gorbachev premiere to good reception

Abhimanyu Dassani, who has created a buzz for his debut movie Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota, was the star at the films presentation at the Midnight Madness segment of the Toronto International Film Festival. Before the film, I trained for eight months for six hours every day in martial arts, yoga, swimming, stick fighting and meditation,” the actor said before the film’s screening on 14 September night. “I used to eat six big meals every day to put on weight.” “I also spent three months in isolation before the shooting because my character Surya doesn’t speak to anyone. In the form of long interviews filled with images and footage of the cataclysmic events from his life, the documentary visually captures Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise in the Soviet Communist Party - from his “godforsaken place” of Stavropol Krai, to Moscow as top leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko died within three years in the mid-1980s. “He was delivered straight from hospital right in front of our camera and then straight back to the ambulance.” Herzog’s co-director Andre Singer said that people in Russia today mistakenly blame Gorbachev for breaking up the Soviet Union.