A Mighty Heart had taken India's media by storm when the Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie team arrived towards end of 2006 at Mumbai and Pune.

The latest on the film is that the entire team of a Mighty Heart was in Cannes for the film's world premiere with key member Irrfan Khan. Actor Aly Khanhas also played a small but significant rolein the film. So did Arti and Kailash Surendranath, who handled the film's India shoot.

British director Michael Winterbottom got his share of appreciation for this intricately made film that unfolds in a strong documentary style.

The film is based on Mariane Pearl's book which gives her experience of harrowing days, during the intense manhunt for her missing husband and Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan when he was kidnapped by jehadis in 2002. At that time when she was six months pregnant with their first child on the real life incident.

After the 9/11 bombing, Pearl was sent on a dangerous assignment in Karachi to meet a man who could tell him more about the shoe bomber, Richard Reid. Finally, a video tape proves that Pearl had been decapitated by his captors. Mariane's steel-hearted optimism collapses and gives way to despairing fate.

the film is through the Point of View of the protagonist, showing Mariane's home, her coloured maid constantly hovering around, her small child symbolising of the world that today's children will be inheriting.

Asra (Archie Panjabi) her husband's Wall Street colleagues and her writer friend joins in the search, which is taken over by the American diplomatic mission and the Pakistani counter-terrorism unit led by a man called Captain (Irrfan Khan).

Daniel Pearl is played by Dan Futterman (who wrote the script for Capote), appearing for most of the film in brief, warm flashbacks that convey the couple's close relationship.

The film's press conference added dimension to its content and intent. French-Cuban Mariane Pearl herself stole the limelight, seated centre-stage, with Brad Pitt at one extreme and Irrfan Khan on the other. The likeness between the real Mariane and Angelina Jolie was surprising. Marianne speaks with the same terse dispassionate tone as Jolie did on screen

Director Winterbottom has taken pains to vividly portray the harsh, settings in Karachi, suggesting that a country's misery breeding terrorism.

The film was shot extempore when it came to the actors. The crew was not given lines. They had to say what was intended in their own words. Even the props kept changing in the same scene. Repeated takes only enhanced the spontaneity of what we felt and enacted.