Cinema of India

Archived Posts from this Category

January 1, 2026

Favourite Films of 2025

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Bangladesh, Cinema of China, Cinema of France, Cinema of India, Cinema of Lebanon, Cinema of Taiwan, Cinema of the Netherlands, Cinema of the USA, Cinema of Turkey, Hollywood, Lists | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
[2] Comments 

2025 was disappointing, even frustrating in both personal and historical terms. At the beginning of the year, I had set myself simple goals, all of which I failed at. My reading plummeted to almost zero, as did my public writing. I had hoped to add more entries to the Curator’s Corner column, but it was not to be. A few projects and opportunities that I was looking forward to didn’t materialize. Not to mention a host of health issues and family emergencies.

The political optimism of 2024 proved not just short lived, but derisory given the impunity with which the lunatics in power and their rabid supporters continued to destroy everything decent, human and life-sustaining. In India, state and market censorship alike have reached absurd levels, awards are now so compromised as to make satirists twiddle their thumbs, festivals are pushed to the brink of dysfunction by a philistine information ministry, naked propaganda seems to be the only way to box-office salvation, critics have been harassed by industry insiders and barbaric hordes on social media for precisely doing their job, celebrities continue to toe the line or silence themselves out of a justified fear of reprisal. All this, just in the domain of cinema.

The only respite for me came in the form of encounters with interesting, reasonable and committed people, especially at the Jakarta Film Week and International Film Festival Kerala, both of which I attended for the first time. The passion and the international camaraderie that I witnessed were welcome assurances that, no matter its immediate currency, bigotry and parochialism will forever be uncool.

In more solitary undertakings, I had the chance to explore parts of Indian documentary history I was unfamiliar with. Among these, I strongly recommend Chalam Bennurkar’s Children of Mini-Japan (1990), Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar’s YCP 1997 (1997), David MacDougall’s Doon School Quintet (2000-04), Deepa Dhanraj’s Invoking Justice (2011) and especially R.V. Ramani’s My Camera and Tsunami (2011).

Besides acclaimed and popular films from Kerala made after 2010, I also caught up on a significant swathe of Malayalam cinema from the 80s and the 90s. This included two canonical masterpieces in Perumthachan (1991) and Ponthan Mada (1994) in addition to numerous remarkable features emerging from a short, bountiful period of heightened creativity: Irakal (1985), Deshadanakkili Karayarilla (1986), Thaniyavarthanam (1987), Amrutham Gamaya (1987), Ponmuttayidunna Tharavu (1988), Dasharatham (1989), Varavelpu (1989), Sandhesam (1991), Bharatham (1991) and Njan Gandharvan (1991), to name but a few. Farewell Sreenivasan, the recently departed actor-director-screenwriter behind many of these titles.

As always, the following list is based on an arbitrary eligibility criterion: films that had a world premiere in 2025.

 

1. Happiness (Firat Yücel, Turkey/Netherlands)

Fatigued and sleep deprived, a Turkish filmmaker in Amsterdam tries to find ways to reduce his excessive screen usage and catch some shuteye. But the horrors of the world, beamed onto digital screens in real time, know no respite. Firat Yücel’s extraordinary desktop essay departs from this premise in all directions, only to return to it with new insights and dizzyingly far-reaching associations. Tracing the agonized drifts of a sensitive, hyperconnected mind, Happiness lays bare a highly contemporary double bind: if the screens we are hooked to keep us away from living in the real world, it is these very screens that helps us make sense of our lived experiences. The filmmaker’s investigation into his bodily malaise leads him to unpack its historical conditions: the colonial legacy that underpins the prosperity of his host country, its flourishing happiness industry and its dubious foreign policies. Yücel’s inward observation takes him ever outward; his exasperation at the immediate present, into the distant past. Rigorous as it is witty and playful, Happiness perfectly embodies the agitations of the modern liberal consciousness, present everywhere and nowhere at once, all too aware of the immensity of human misery as well as its own impotence in the face of it. [World Premiere: Visions du Réel]

 

2. Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs, USA)

Ira Sachs’ eminently cinematic re-creation of a tape-recorded conversation, from December 1974, between writer Linda Rosenkrantz (played by Rebecca Hall) and photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) is an object lesson in the creative possibilities of redundancy, a vital illustration of how the film medium can actualize itself, not by shunning the written word but, on the contrary, by faithfully embracing it. Over 76 condensed minutes, Hujar recollects a day from his life in New York City in rigorous detail — a fascinating mix of the ordinary and the extraordinary, recalling The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975) — to an attentive, sympathetic Rosenkratz amid the changing light of his apartment. As Hujar’s endless stream of speech washes over us to the point of exhaustion, our focus turns from its specific content to the process by which memory becomes material. Drawing from transcripts of the conversation — and not Rosenkrantz’s original recording, now lost —Whishaw’s incredibly textured performance reveals the task of imaginative translation that underlies all actorly work. For all its thrilling verbosity, Sachs’s film is a tribute to the art of listening, to this intimate space of friendship in which the hierarchy between the memorable and the mundane ceases to exist. [WP: Sundance Film Festival]

 

3. Manal Issa, 2024 (Elisabeth Subrin, Lebanon/USA)

Where Elisabeth Subrin’s powerful Maria Schneider, 1983 (2022) — based on a televised interview of the eponymous French actress — created doubles, Manal Issa, 2024 proposes a negation. Here, Subrin asks the Lebanese-French actress Manal Issa, one of the three participants of the former film, the same questions that Schneider was posed in the original interview. Vocal about her stances, Issa talks about the poverty of meaningful roles offered to Arab-origin actresses, the limitations of the capitalist production model, the choice of moving back to Lebanon during crisis and the importance of speaking up against political iniquity. She adds that she feels professionally isolated for voicing her opinions, for calling out Israel’s bombing of Gaza. While we listen to her responses, Issa herself remains offscreen, her refusal to sustain her career by censoring herself echoed by Subrin’s refusal to show her. “If I can’t be true to myself, there is no point showing myself,” the actress concludes. Like Schneider’s palpable reluctance, Issa’s self-negation stems from an outlook that privileges life over films, reality over fiction. Six hours after the shoot, an end card notes, “Israeli airstrikes escalated throughout Lebanon, killing over 500 people in one day.” [WP: Cinéma du Réel]

 

4. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)

All appeal is sexual, political appeal especially so. Among other things, Paul Thomas Anderson’s wild, action-filled, hysterically funny ride through a caricatural America torn between white supremacists and antifa insurgents — each more paranoid than the other about imagined contaminations — lays bare the erotic drive animating ideological cohesion (and ideological sabotage). Leonardo DiCaprio’s failed revolutionary, mentally arrested in the 1970s, and Sean Penn’s boyish, waif-like sergeant are twisted projections of each other’s fears. Whether the film is reactionary, apolitical or progressive is beside the point. This is a work by an artist who contemplates a polarized society, its excesses and its mess-ups with sage amusement, or a stoner’s delight, without giving in to cynicism or misanthropy. DiCaprio delivers the performance of the year in a movie filled with performances of the year, each one on a different register, all of it nevertheless brought into perfect harmony by dint of sheer directorial orchestration. One Battle After Another stands tall in a movie culture dominated by safe, anaemic films calculated to say the right things and avoid broaching the wrong things. It made me wish we had more filmmakers who actually felt something between their legs. [WP: international commercial release]

 

5. Beyond the Mast (Mohammad Nuruzzaman, Bangladesh)

In this rapturous slice-of-life portrait, a small commercial boat with an all-male crew goes from port to port along a river in Bangladesh selling oil. When the crew’s kindly cook takes a stowaway child under his aegis, he runs afoul of the boat’s ill-tempered, scheming helmsman, covetous of the captain’s job. Despite a good deal of on-board intrigue, there is very little drama, strictly speaking, in Mohammad Nuruzzaman’s artisanal second feature, which doesn’t even seek to create lyrical moments in the vein of, say, Satyajit Ray. Yet, this is a highly poetic work, the poetry arising primarily from the filmmaker’s intent, non-judgmental way of looking at a small, enclosed world, its rituals, its diverse people and their human foibles: touches of jealousy, compassion, malevolence, ambition and camaraderie; a parade of life simply passing by. The form is meditative yet brisk — with very elegant camera choreography — and remains indifferent to fashionable arthouse formulas, stylistic shorthand or established screenplay structures. Even the film’s casual neo-realism doesn’t aim at traditional qualities of empathy and psychological description; it rather inspires Ozu-like contemplation. Just a lovingly crafted film. [WP: Moscow International Film Festival]

 

6. Roohrangi (Tusharr Madhavv, India/Netherlands)

With a camera in hand, a gay filmmaker from South Asia walks around in a park in Amsterdam known as a cruising hotspot. What he finds in this place of fleeting encounters is a kind of time warp, the apparent permanence of its majestic trees, their gnarled roots and variegated textures reminding him of his own roots back in Lucknow, India. They recall, in particular, his grandfather’s discoloured skin, caused by leukoderma, which made him look like a white man — a dual identity paralleling the filmmaker’s own. Echoing this image, Roohrangi starts to lose its colours too, shedding its skin to reveal various layers of memory, history and fantasy underlying a leisurely stroll, as different geographies and eras interpenetrate one another. Like in the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the forest in Roohrangi is a liminal, essentially queer space that enables communion with other lives, other worlds — a glimpse into different possibilities of being. With curiosity and formal openness, Tusharr Madhavv mixes stylized, essayistic passages with casual interviews with the park’s denizens. The result is an evocative, visually striking work, at once experimental and accessible, that achieves the right balance of discursivity, mystery and invention. [WP: Ann Arbor Film Festival]

 

7. Past Is Present (Shaheen Dill-Riaz, Germany/Bangladesh)

In 2007, Berlin-based Bangladeshi documentarian Shaheen Dill-Riaz found himself in the midst of a family scandal: while studying abroad, his sister Mitul had secretly married her cousin to the great chagrin of her parents. As this taboo union began to tear the family apart, Dill-Riaz decided to mediate between Mitul in Australia, his elder brother Amirul in the USA and his heartbroken parents back home in Dhaka. In Past Is Present, Dill-Riaz turns his camera onto himself and his dear ones, producing a sweeping domestic saga shot over fourteen years and across four continents. Tracing his parents’ journey from rural Bangladesh to Dhaka, and their three children’s subsequent drift to far-flung corners of the globe, the filmmaker examines the complex personal fallout of voluntary migration, presented here in all its liberating and melancholic dimensions. Dill-Riaz seamlessly interweaves moments of torrid drama with passages of mundane poetry, his handheld camera adopting a transparent, unassuming style. The film’s international narrative produces a startling contrast of textures and lifestyles, but also crystallizes the profound continuities in emotional and moral values across cultures. A touching study in the tyranny of distance, Past Is Present actualizes the immortal struggle between the home and the world. [WP: International Film Festival Rotterdam]

 

8. Obscure Night – Ain’t I a Child? (Sylvain George, France)

The concluding chapter of Sylvain George’s trilogy on illegal immigration is an extraordinary object of close, unflinching observation. The film follows three Tunisian teenagers who take temporary refuge in Paris after having been shuttled by immigration authorities across various cities in Western Europe. With remarkable intimacy and equanimity, George’s camera films the gang at slightly below the eye-level as they wander the roads of night-time Paris, huddle around fire, get into nasty fights with their Algerian counterparts, listen to street music or make the occasional phone call back home. An indifferent Eiffel Tower glitters perpetually in the background as the boys find themselves prisoners under an open sky. Shot in stark monochrome with eye-popping passages of abstraction, George’s film lends a monumental weight to images and lives we would rather not see. As a white artist making films on vulnerable sans papiers, George is bound to ruffle some feathers. But his film demonstrates that, sometimes, you need to strain certain ethical boundaries to arrive at newer forms of looking and understanding. Neither incriminating its subjects nor making any apology for them, Obscure Night – “Ain’t I a Child?” reveals the herculean difficulty of creating a truly humanist work. [WP: Visions du Réel]

 

9. May the Soil Be Everywhere (Yehui Zhao, China/USA)

Yehui Zhao’s winsome debut feature begins as a personal documentary about the filmmaker’s search for her roots, but it gradually blooms into a sprawling examination of Chinese society and its evolving relationship to the land across modes of production. In her quest to unearth her family tree, the filmmaker finds herself peeling back layers upon layers of violent history — an excavation that takes her back to the soil, to a primordial ecology: caves that have now become sand mines, dogs that were once wolves, high-speed rail that now cut through unmarked graves. May the Soil Be Everywhere offers a rare and unusual glimpse into China’s pre-revolutionary past that takes us across vastly different terrains, time periods, generations: we learn of landlords who, during the revolution, became persecuted cave dwellers who then turned into Stakhanovite foot soldiers of Mao and are now digital filmmakers in a globalized world. The film’s direct and unaffected voiceover enables the overdone format of the personal documentary to break loose into a free-form essay featuring humorous animation and re-enacted tableaux. If the filmmaker’s attachment to familial lineage feels a little excessive, it undeniably carries a subversive force within post-revolutionary Chinese society. [WP: True/False Film Fest]

 

10. Admission (Quentin Hsu, Taiwan)

Panicked by the rejection of their six-year-old ward at an elite boarding school, an affluent tiger couple convenes an emergency meeting with their “fixer” and one of the school’s board members at a resort. Emerging from their negotiations and blame games is a stark portrait of a childhood labouring under someone else’s dreams. Quentin Hsu’s razor-sharp debut is a formalist kammerspiel that is Mungiu/Farhadi-like in its dissection of the moral corruption of the Chinese middle-class. But the approach to the material is entirely anti-naturalistic, pointedly theatrical. The film makes phenomenal use of its 4:3 aspect ratio and off-screen space, with the masquerade and subterfuge of the dramatic situation reflected in actors constantly gliding in and out of the frame, their bodies now eclipsed by the décor, now irrupting into the shot. The frame is constantly energized and de-energized by these microscopically choreographed movements in a way that recalls the Zürcher brothers. The actors are little more than props in the director’s precise, Kubrick-like design, but it’s bracing to witness a work that articulates its ideas through brute mise en scène, especially for a subject that would have called for a more psycho-realist treatment. [WP: Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival]

 

Special Mention: Living the Land (Huo Meng, China)

 

Favourite Films of

2024 • 2023 • 2022 • 2021 • 2020 • 2019

2015 • 2014 • 2013 • 2012 • 2011 • 2010 • 2009

 

May 12, 2025

Showcase: The Light for the Rest of the Walk (Naresh Hegde Dodmari, 2024)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Curator's Corner | Tags: , , , , , |
Leave a Comment 

[Part of Curator’s Corner, a section dedicated to showcasing work of emerging and marginal filmmakers. See here for details.]

A few days ago, I watched the Malayalam classic Irakal (1985). K.G. George’s dark and disturbing picture of youthful anomie finding outlet in sadistic violence. Irakal locates the root of its protagonist Baby’s malaise in his environment, namely his feudal, power-hungry household of landgrabbers, liquor barons and assorted self-seekers. The family in George’s film is a hotbed of pragmatic evil, Baby being simply its Platonic ideal. A new independent Kannada film by Naresh Hegde Dodmari, Tingl Belku (The Light for the Rest of the Walk), crafts a counter-portrait of sorts, offering a gentle domestic drama where the family is a source of support and salvation for a sensitive young man losing his bearings in life.

A poet who grew up in Honnavara and Yellapura in northwestern Karnataka (not far from the home of his near-namesake Natesh Hegde), Naresh Hegde wasn’t particularly drawn to films in his childhood. It was during his days as an engineering student in Bangalore – and later as an employee in Pune, where he had the chance to interact with film school students – that he became acquainted with international cinema through pirated DVDs and public screenings. Like a number of his self-taught peers, Hegde began his journey with short films made for YouTube before scraping together private equity to produce his first feature.

At the centre of Tingl Belku is Sandeep, an engineering student who returns home to Kumta, Uttara Kannada, for the summer vacation. Once an active poet, Sandeep has become, per his editor friend, sporadic and abstruse in his writing. He often takes off on his bike, spending his days alone away from home. Concerned with his aloofness, Sandeep’s parents seek the help of Harish, a local lawyer whom they are in talks with for marriage with their daughter. We gradually learn that Sandeep is under the influence of drugs and that he has been keeping away from college due to a police raid in the campus. As Harish tries to get to the bottom of things, Sandeep becomes increasingly incommunicative and introverted.

Tingl Belku stands out from the horde of cautionary drug dramas in the way it steers clear of the sensationalism inherent in the subject. There are no dramatizations here of withdrawal symptoms, no writhing in underlit corridors, no shocking glimpses of syringes or tie-off belts. Not once do we actually see Sandeep take drugs; we don’t even get to know what kind of drug it is. Part of this elision has to do with Hegde’s abstract treatment of the topic, which doesn’t really delve into the nitty-gritty of substance abuse or its sociological reality; the filmmaker is rather interested in the effects of addiction on the fabric of a rural middle-class family. But it is also the result of a consciously dialled-down approach to drama in which conflicts are defused as soon as they arise and characters are treated with a great deal of dignity.

Hegde depicts Sandeep’s affliction without condescension or pity. A dreamy-eyed poet of a philosophical bent, Sandeep views his drug habit as an exploration into expanded consciousness, a way to access realms of artistic inspiration inaccessible in waking life. Played without frills by Sharath Raysad, Sandeep shares little of the screen conventions of a discontented young man. Although his haze keeps him away from his family for long periods, he is well aware of the implications of his addiction on his near and dear. Not one to vocally rebel, Sandeep lays low and takes particular care not to upset the family cart, dutifully helping his father renovate the house and making sure that his situation doesn’t jeopardize his sister’s impending wedding.

These moral nuances extend to the secondary characters as well. Harish (Naresh Bhat), the prospective brother-in-law, fashions himself as a community leader, a problem solver who likes to make his presence felt everywhere he goes. But he is also a genuinely nice guy who goes out of his way to help Sandeep and his family. Above all, there is Sandeep’s soft-spoken father, Gopal (Venkatraman Gudaballi), the antithesis to the authoritarian patriarchs that dominate Indian cinema. Gopal, who defers to Harish in handling the situation, understands the limits to which he can probe his dodgy ward, the boundaries that he must respect with a son who now towers above his shoulders. More than anything, it is in these closely observed textures of everyday living that the film comes alive.

A beautiful sense of proportion and discretion marks all the relationships in the film: the palpable feeling that these are delicate bonds that it would be unwise to stress beyond a point. The film’s form reflects this reserve. In its leisurely pacing, soft naturalism and refusal of cable-TV hysteria, Tingl Belku may remind one of the telefilms that used to be broadcast on Doordarshan in the 1990s. Scenes are built elegantly, with no more than two (largely static) camera setups and attention paid to the flows of everyday interaction. Even when the style is uneven, caught between description of facts and an elaboration of the Sandeep’s interiority, there is a uniformity in tone that holds the film together.

Hegde imbues Tingl Belku with a heightened sense of place and time, with its scenes unfolding in strikingly varying landscapes that showcase the visual richness of the Uttara Kannada region: vistas of plains, woods, low hills, beaches, highways and fields all find prominent representation. Even if one doesn’t remember plot details, it would be hard to forget the stairways leading down to Sandeep’s house, or the one inside the living room connecting to the young man’s attic. This visual approach lends the film a subtly expressionistic quality where the settings reflect Sandeep’s fluctuating moods: the reclusive forest, the expansive sea, the melancholic horizon and so on.

An admirable debut feature of overarching benevolence, Tingl Belku had its world premiere in competition at the Rajasthan International Film Festival and is currently awaiting its international premiere.

 

Bio

Writer and director Nareshkumar Hegde (33, BE, MBA) was brought up in the Western Ghats and coastal region of Karnataka. He developed an interest in poetry and creative writing during his college days, which later transitioned to visual storytelling. Before completing his debut feature-length film Tingl Belku (The Light for the Rest of the Walk) in 2024, he made six short films which were selected and awarded in various short film festivals. Three of his short films, Mehnat, Bennigelliya Kannu and Parallel Lines, were finalists in three editions of the Bengaluru International Short Film Festival.

Contact

nareshandfilms@gmail.com | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram

Filmography

  • Feet & Patience (2012), 4 min., mobile phone
  • Three Boxes (2014), 12 min., digital
  • Feathers (2016), 20 min., digital
  • Mehnat (2017), 17 min., digital
  • Samantara Geregalu (Parallel Lines) (2018), 10 min., digital
  • Bennigelliya Kannu (Uncover) (2020), 23 min., digital
  • Tingl Belku (The Light for the Rest of the Walk) (2024), 108 min., digital.

Showcase

Teaser for The Light for the Rest of the Walk (2024)

 

April 30, 2025

Kumar Shahani + Ashish Avikunthak

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Filmmakers | Tags: , , , |
Leave a Comment 

[The following piece was published in Film Comment and written for the upcoming edition of Prismatic Ground.]

Prismatic Ground, the New York–based festival of experimental documentary and avant-garde film, is honoring Indian filmmakers Kumar Shahani and Ashish Avikunthak in its upcoming fifth edition. Shahani, who passed away in February 2024 at the age of 83, will be commemorated with a four-film retrospective, while Avikunthak will receive the festival’s Ground Glass Award for “outstanding contribution in the field of experimental media.” The two filmmakers have more in common than meets the eye.

Born in Larkana in current-day Pakistan and moving to Bombay with his family after the 1947 Partition, Shahani studied at the Film Institute of India in Pune, where he came under the tutelage of filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak (The Cloud-Capped Star, 1960) and Marxist historian D.D. Kosambi. Another influence encountered during his formative years was Robert Bresson, on whose A Gentle Woman (1969) Shahani assisted while he was a visiting student at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in Paris.

His first feature, Maya Darpan (1972), a formally rigorous portrait of a desolate woman wilting in a feudal mansion, was such a radical departure from the intellectually respectable idiom of neorealism that Satyajit Ray excoriated it for “threatening film language with extinction.” With state funding of niche, commercially unviable titles becoming increasingly difficult, Shahani wouldn’t be able to make another feature for 12 years, inaugurating a working life marked by unrealized projects and long gaps between films that he would fill with research, writing, and teaching. Across four decades, he would make no more than seven features, in addition to numerous shorts.

Like Shahani, though a generation younger, Avikunthak was also a child of Partition, born into a Hindu family of Punjabi origin that moved from Pakistan to Calcutta, in India, after 1947. Where Shahani experienced the churn of May 1968 during his time in Paris, Avikunthak credits his political consciousness to living through the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1992-93 in Bombay. His body of work, spanning eight features and seven shorts including Kalighat Fetish (1999) and Vakratunda Swaha (2010), demonstrates a dedicated engagement with Hindu iconography. Avikunthak’s invocation of vernacular gods, often visceral in its nudity and graphic violence, resists both the perversions of colonial puritanism and the contemporary Hindu Right’s consolidation of heterogeneous religious beliefs and practices in the subcontinent.

Shahani and, to a lesser extent, Avikunthak have both been associated with the Parallel Cinema movement in India. But their high-modernist practice stands far removed from the socially minded but formally conservative works that dominate the Parallel Cinema tradition. Unlike their peers, the two artists present their films primarily as intellectual constructs undergirded by strong philosophical frameworks: a theory of the epic form in the case of Shahani, Tantric spiritual thought for Avikunthak. Not for them the intuitive groping evoked by the word “experimental.”

Above all, Shahani’s and Avikunthak’s films find common ground in their rejection of the psychological realism that dominates classical narrative cinema. A Marxist by persuasion, Shahani framed his rejection in pointedly Brechtian terms: “Realism of detail,” he wrote, “can be a mask for eluding the real problems of society, its class relations.” Denying viewers cathartic immersion in a self-contained fictional world, Shahani instead invited them to arrive at a rational analysis of the relations depicted in his films. For Avikunthak, this rejection is a matter of religious ritual. Emptied of individual psychology, his human figures become metaphysical vehicles embedded in predetermined textual and gestural transactions.

Audiences at Prismatic Ground will have the chance to discover two singular artists whose works, despite their seeming hermeticism, stand in serious dialogue with the politics of their times.

 

April 21, 2025

Spotlight: MK Abhilash

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Curator's Corner | Tags: , , , , |
1 Comment 

[Part of Curator’s Corner, a section dedicated to showcasing work of emerging and marginal filmmakers.]

Pseudo Emotions: the banner under which Bangalore-based filmmaker, music composer and poet MK Abhilash produced his earliest shorts gives a glimpse into what one can expect from his quirky and original body of work. Abhilash’s three recent short films revolve around highly melodramatic situations — infidelity, childlessness, terminal illness — set in recognizable everyday reality. But they derail our expectations of the premise through the introduction of a limited number of uncanny, bizarrely incongruous elements.

Take Kuuk Aah? (2024). A sleepyhead husband, living off his wife’s income, brings home a chicken that he rescues from a sadistic friend. As this idler roams the city looking for public places to sleep in, his long-suffering wife becomes emotionally involved with the fowl, now living in the house in a semi-human form, dressed like a butler. The basic dramatic situation is utterly familiar — marital strife, emotional neglect, extra-marital affair — but the plot unfolds with an otherworldly logic and texture that are anything but familiar.

The primary inspiration for his stories, Abhilash says, comes from the lives of those around him; in the case of Kuuk Aah?, the spontaneous lament of a neighbour whose wife eloped with a domestic help. But the films transmute these experiences, turning real human emotions into parodies – pseudo emotions – that work against conventional dramatic structures of viewer identification and empathy. Something is always ‘off’, keeping us at a distance while drawing us into a plausible world that resembles our own.

Break through their humorous exterior, you find darker undercurrents. Moda Moda (2025, awaiting premiere) centres on a childless couple comprising a chauvinist husband who doesn’t want to adopt and his dismayed wife. Things take a turn when the man’s pregnant sister comes home following a domestic dispute and persuades her brother to let her stay in his body. Lo! The ill-tempered husband is now pregnant himself and develops a loving bond with his wife. That is until the sister’s alcoholic husband arrives to take her back.

If Moda Moda overlays its atmosphere of inchoate dread with dark humour, Dictionary Mohan (2022) is positively bleak. Having befriended the last survivor of a whistle-speaking tribe, Mohan embarks on a whistle-to-Kannada dictionary to help his alien mate integrate into the society. Alas, Mohan is diagnosed with a terminal disease, leaving him incapable of completing the dictionary. Everyone around Mohan is self-absorbed, isolated, locked up in the silo of their mind, unable to communicate, doomed to incomprehension. The film would be unbearable if it weren’t funny.

The dissonance between subject matter and tone of Abhilash’s films is amplified by the non-naturalist acting style that swings between TV-soap hysteria and cartoonish flatness. Aashith, who plays the lead in all three films, has an expressive, comic earnestness at odds with the ironic nature of the film; the lazy husband he portrays in Kuuk Aah? might as well be a stick figure. Reactions in these films are exaggerated, gestures are isolated and amplified, and the dialogue is insistent and overly enunciated. The excessive politeness of the characters towards each other is undercut by bursts of unexpected nastiness.

Dictionary Mohan

Kuuk Aah?

Moda Moda

Compared to Abhilash’s earliest work, which are heavy on concept and denser in their writing, these three shorts attest to a conscious formal simplification. Set mostly indoors, the new films are shot on digital monochrome with a largely static camera, from oblique or frontal angles, and sometimes with overly dramatic lighting. The dialogue and the plotting are sparser and demand less effort of assimilation from the audience. Abhilash makes striking use of music and animation: 8-bit electronic loops, doodles and symbols overlaid on live-action footage and occasional use of saturated colour to offer visual relief, all of which are present in Moda Moda. In Dictionary Mohan, the whistle language is given a distinctly musical quality rather than the prosody of Kannada or English.

Abhilash currently produces his work as part of the Neelavarana Collective, a heterogeneous group of Ambedkarite artists from Bangalore who participate in each other’s projects. Mahishaa, the founder of the collective, shot Moda Moda while two other members, Naveen Tejaswi and Ajay Tambe, feature in the cast of Kuuk Aah?. Abhilash lends a helping hand in Mahishaa’s films and music videos, composing, for instance, the propulsive score for Babasaheb in Bengaluru (2024). Where the other works by the collective tend to adopt a style closer to realism and a more direct mode of engaging with real-world politics, Abhilash’s films and poems have a more whimsical, inward-looking quality, like the visions of someone staring dreamily out the window.

An intriguing aspect of Abhilash’s films is their curious emphasis on bodily transformations. In 8th Day of The Week (2017), a “human shadow” is anxiously waiting to become fully human, while A Mute’s Telephone (2018) features gender reassignment and voice transplant surgeries. The moribund lexicographer of Dictionary Mohan turns into an apple tree, just as the chicken of Kuuk Aah? transforms into a chivalrous gentleman. In Moda Moda, the human body is fully mutable, capable of hosting other bodies and their characteristics.

Some of these elements, particularly the taste for physical mutations, may have to do with Abhilash’s fondness for anime ­— he cites Satoshi Kon and Masaaki Yuasa as inspirations — as well as folk tales and local beliefs found across India. There seem to me to be few immediate precedents to Abhilash’s films, but in their shaggy-dog storytelling and their gleefully silly scrambling of the social code, they share something of wackiness found in the work of another musician-filmmaker, Quentin Dupieux. Like the Frenchman’s one-joke odysseys, Abhilash’s shorts come to embody a kind of vernacular surrealism that employs and explodes the codes of domestic melodrama in quaint and refreshingly absurd ways. Whether or not there is any greater significance, any hefty subtext, to these baffling stories, the films’ entertaining, provocative quality is beyond doubt. The result makes you wince and laugh out at the same time.

 

Bio

Born on January 5, 1997, MK Abhilash is a filmmaker, music producer, and poet. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore. He is part of Neelavarana, a Bangalore-based counter culture collective, which showcases Dalit-Bahujan aesthetics and narratives of the region. 

Contact

muran3.athma@gmail.com | Instagram

Filmography

  • Vaaradha Entané Dhina (8th Day of the Week), 2017, 13 min., digital
  • Moogana Telephone (A Mute’s Telephone), 2018, 19 min., digital
  • Dictionary Mohan, 2022, 28 min., digital
  • Kuuk Aah?,  2024, 30 min., digital
  • Moda Moda, 2025, 20 min., digital

Showcase

Dictionary Mohan (2022)

Kuuk Aah? (2024)

 

 

April 7, 2025

Filmmaking as Farming: An Interview with Natesh Hegde

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Interviews | Tags: , , , , , , |
Leave a Comment 

[The following interview was conducted for the Forum section of the Berlinale, where the filmmaker’s second feature Tiger’s Pond had its world premiere in February 2025.]

 

Berlinale Forum: Welcome, Natesh, and congrats on your new feature. Perhaps we could begin with the title of the film which is Tiger’s Pond in English, and Vaghachipani in Kannada [the main language spoken in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, ed.]. Could we talk about the place that it is set in, also called Vaghachipani, which seems to be a fictional village, but also very strongly rooted to the region you come from?

Natesh Hegde: The film is shot in my hometown where I also shot my previous feature, Pedro (2021). I shot that film in the rainy season and this film in winter. The title comes from the name of a real village nearby. That name had always fascinated me. Also, in the film, there is the lurking presence of a tiger. I wanted to evoke that fear. So I thought this would be an apt title.

The credits say that the film is based on the stories of Amaresh Nugadoni. What attracted you to his writings and what did you draw from them?

The character of Pathi, the girl. I had seen one such mentally-challenged girl at the bus stop in the town of Sirsi, where I was doing my graduation. One day, I noticed that her tummy had suddenly bulged, and after some time, she disappeared. This character always intrigued me. What happened to her? How can a society behave that way? Such a character was in Amaresh Nugadoni’s writings. Then I rewrote the script and made lot of changes. Once a short story becomes a film, there is a shift of medium, where we are creating something else. So I took that as a starting point.

The figure of Pathi is so striking, especially the actor, her unforgettable face and her screen-piercing gaze. How did you cast this actor and what were your directions to her?

She’s a mentally-challenged girl from my village. I couldn’t direct her like other actors: explain a scene and make her act. She’s there and I created the film around her. It’s strange, but she started responding to me. The form of the film is derived from her being, instead of the other way around. It’s absurd, but I feel like the celluloid wanted her, you know.

How did you develop this character?

NH: I saw her as the central human figure around which there are all kinds of lust: lust for power, for money, for identity. She’s the only pure figure, the only character not pursuing these things, not bothered about anything. She’s just there, present.

 

[Read the full interview here]

 

January 1, 2025

Favourite Films of 2024

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Bangladesh, Cinema of Belgium, Cinema of Germany, Cinema of Hong Kong, Cinema of India, Cinema of Italy, Cinema of Mexico, Cinema of Romania, Cinema of Switzerland, Cinema of the USA, Lists | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
Leave a Comment 

With only a handful of posts published, the blog pretty much went into hibernation this year. While 2024 was full of opportunities, encounters and discoveries that I am immensely grateful for, it was also, personally, a year of greater flight from the world, including the world of cinema in some ways. I cut myself off more and more from the news cycle and social media for sanity’s sake, which has meant that I’m woefully unaware of, among other things, what’s making waves in the awards circuit and what the “important” films of this year are. At a glance, I don’t recognize most of the titles featured on major year-end lists.

At the same time, I find myself more embedded than ever in the professional world of cinema, working with different film festivals in various capacities, minor or otherwise. While I haven’t been able to write and translate as much as I would love to, I’ve found myself increasingly involved in programming and selecting films. This has had, I think, considerable consequence on the way I watch and write about cinema.

Firstly, the majority of the titles I saw this year were works-in-progress (WIP): projects in post-production, without CGI, colour grading, sound-mix, and even some shots or subplots. Such a ‘pre-natal’ view of films tends to put the viewer in a state of disenchantment in which one becomes too aware of the strings being pulled: actors simulating shock, disgust or joy in front of blank screens, interacting with inexistant elements of the décor, suspended on ropes, drowned in ambient noise or struggling to convey an emotion, hoping that the music will do that rest.

Over time, watching such volumes of unfinished films could also make a year-end list like this a hassle, since it I have to constantly check whether a particular WIP that I liked last year has released this year or is still waiting for a premiere. More crucially, such lists will likely be even more aleatory and subject to the vagaries of my viewing assignments rather than, as in the past, seeking to take into consideration, even if nominally, consensus titles and popular favourites.

The bulk of my writing this year has also been of a private nature, tied to the programming work. Destined for a handful of known people within a festival, instead of a wider readership online, the texts have undergone a change in kind. If they have gained in freedom and concision, they have lost the rigour and rhetorical force that comes with public writing. I can’t yet imagine what kind of impact this might have on my instincts – and mental capacity to engage with films – in the long run.

All this preamble to say that this blog may continue to remain inactive in the coming year(s). While that is nothing new – it was already in cold storage along with my cinephilia from 2016 to 2019 – it does feel different not to be identifying primarily as a critic/translator anymore. Interesting times ahead.

Here’s wishing a happy new year.

 

1. The Adamant Girl (P.S. Vinothraj, India)

When Kottukkaali (The Adamant Girl) released in theatres, miraculously, in August in Tamil Nadu, it was accompanied by substantial popular backlash. Admittedly, Kottukkaali is a tough-minded work, one that is perhaps harder to instantly ‘like’ than Vinothraj’s debut Koozhangal (2021). Like the latter, it makes us intimate with the unbridled rage of its male lead, but it does so without the emotional cushion of a child’s perspective. Instead, the film performs a high-wire act, tensely balancing different, conflicting points of views towards its protagonist, Meena, a young lovelorn girl deemed possessed and taken to a local godman for exorcism by her extended family that includes Pandi, the hot-tempered cousin she is betrothed to. While the entourage constantly discusses what is to be done about the girl, Meena herself remains resolutely mute, her silence conveying both defiance and stoic resignation. Kottukkaali explores both the horrific dimensions of this pervasive practice and the subversive space of resistance it offers to the ‘possessed’, temporarily immune from secular violence. At once sophisticated and utterly simple, Kottukkaali respects its audience’s imagination and intelligence while withholding nothing from them. In its formal wit, its trenchant social portraiture and its uncompromising humanism, it represents a significant leap forward for Vinothraj. [World Premiere: Berlin International Film Festival]

 

2. Twilight of the Warriors – Walled In (Soi Cheang, Hong Kong)

Decades in the making, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, Soi Cheang’s supremely kinetic martial arts epic, forges a double legend linking the mythical past of the now-demolished Walled City and a vibrant, close-knit Hong Kong of the eighties before the island’s handover to China. In gargantuan sets of stunning detail, the film recreates the ramshackle complex, not just the densely packed mass of its buildings, but also the thriving economy and community of this dizzyingly vertical ghetto. Desperate to evade the police and gang members, scrappy refugee Lok enters the Kowloon Walled City, a seedy, crime-ridden slum complex exempt from the law and run under the benign authority of Cyclone. Lok’s diligence and fighting spirit attract the paternal Cyclone, but when the young man’s past comes to light, the very existence of the Walled City is endangered. A masterclass in modern cinematic action, the film conceives its astonishing martial-arts sequences in a close co-choreography of camera movement, continuity editing, geometric décor and athletic performers, the whole presented at human scale and close to real-time speed. With every shot having the force of an abstract painting in its dynamic sight lines, Walled In delivers a sweeping, sensational spectacle. [WP: commercial release]

 

3. Who Cares? (Alexe Poukine, Belgium)

Kneel down, and you will believe, said Pascal. In That Which Does Not Kill (2019), Alexe Poukine had actors re-enact another person’s reason-defying testimony of sexual assault, allowing them to find pathways to empathy through text, performance and the spoken word. Deeping this line of inquiry, Who Cares? looks at a soft-skill course in Lausanne, Switzerland, in which trainee doctors and caregivers engage in simulated conversations with actors playing patients, with the goal of being more mindful of patients’ feelings during diagnosis. At the heart of this course aimed at humanising healthcare is the belief that empathy, like other qualities, can be learnt through performance, repetition and critical feedback. Even as it brings us close to this view, Poukine’s film qualifies it, presenting us another theatre-based training session in which real medical staff grapple with their professional frustrations born of difficult working conditions, revealing how individual goodwill finds its limits in institutional realities. Like Harun Farocki’s best work, Who Cares? zeroes in on the niche rituals of a highly specialized field, only to lay bare broader civilization and historical undercurrents; in this case, the contradictions generated by the high premium placed on individual wellbeing in western societies. [WP: Cinéma du Réel]

 

4. The Damned (Roberto Minervini, Italy/USA)

In 1862, during the American Civil War, a troop of Union soldiers is sent to survey the uncharted territories of the West. The young men only have a vague understanding of the reasons for the war, but have their own motivations for donning the uniform. They bide their time, play cards and baseball, and engage in occasional skirmishes against a looming, largely invisible enemy. In his first fictional feature, Minervini forges a spare, brooding Western featuring the rural White southerners who populated his documentaries on backwoods America. Their dialect, diction and body language are modern, and this deliberate anachronism lends the film the texture of a filmed performance. In casting marginalized, stereotyped individuals as Union soldiers and placing them at the very origin of the creation of the United States, Minervini monumentalizes them in the vein of Straub-Huillet’s peasants-turned-gods. At the same time, the counter-casting obliges the non-actors to creatively participate in a founding myth that is very different from the “lost cause” narrative dear to the South. The result is a kind of Lehrstück for both the participants and the audience, a vital gesture of bridge-building in a house that finds itself divided once more. [WP: Cannes International Film Festival]

 

5. Kiss Wagon (Midhun Murali, India)

In a film culture where a project shepherded through half-a-dozen funding bodies, script labs, residencies and international co-producers is deemed ‘indie’, here is a film that obliges us to recalibrate our notions of what independent cinema could mean. The credit roll of Midhun Murali’s animated digital saga is entirely split between the filmmaker, his creative partner Greeshma Ramachandran and the voice actor Jicky Paul. Kiss Wagon charts the sprawling odyssey of Isla, a cocaine-addled courier girl, who leads a disengaged life in a police state under the sway of a powerful, puritanical cult. When she is entrusted by a mysterious client to deliver a kiss to an encrypted address, Isla finds herself on the wrong side of a massive military-theocratic conspiracy. Narrated in a mix of tongues real and invented, using a range of animation techniques classical and cutting-edge, Midhun’s film tells a mythical tale of the planetary struggle between the darkness of religious dogma and the light of cinema. A revisionist testament in four chapters, Kiss Wagon is an epic ballad of a paradise lost and regained; regained not through the force of institutionalized virtue, but through the agitations of outsiders, non-conformists, misfits and weirdos. A homemade cinematic A-bomb, delivered with a kiss. [WP: International Film Festival Rotterdam]

 

6. We Are Inside (Farah Kassem, Lebanon)

The family documentary may currently be the most shopworn, convention-ridden genre in non-fiction film. But Farah Kassem’s three-hour-long domestic epic We Are Inside represents a sweeping personal work that makes a strong case for its continued existence. Following the demise of her mother, thirty-something European resident Kassem returns home to Tripoli, Lebanon, after fifteen years of absence to live with her cantankerous octogenarian poet-father. She spends her time learning Arabic from him, cutting his hair, tending to his wounds, sorting his medicine, driving him around and, most entertainingly, participating in his old boys’ meetups. Poetry becomes both an heirloom the filmmaker inherits and the means through which she concretises the daughterly bond. As the world outside falls apart, with Lebanon experiencing one shock after another, the film turns into a rumination on the role of artmaking during times of political crises, the artist oscillating between the pursuit of beauty and the reflection of truth, between the personal and the political, between inside and the outside. An instructive companion piece to Abbas Fahdel’s Tales of the Purple House (2022), We Are Inside offers a rich, funny and moving work that deserves wider viewing.  [WP: Visions du Réel]

 

7. Wikiriders (Clara Winter, Mi(gu)el Ferràez, Megan Marsh, Mexico/Germany)

If you ever wondered where the missing Human Surge sequel was, here is a less punishing proposition. A super-chill hangout film, Wikiriders centres on a multilingual band of three friends – one speaking English, the other Spanish and the third German, interchangeably and out of lip sync – who undertake a road trip from Mexico to the USA in search of a powerful (fictional?) family that has had an outsized influence on the history of the two countries. The trio may be navigating the Mexican landscape, but they are also virtual surfers, following the rabbit hole of Wikipedia edits about/by the members of the family. Wikiriders takes the epistemological processes of the internet as inspiration for its structure, hopping from one narrative tab to another, featuring memes for characters and making maps of meaning out of digital babel, while also raising pertinent questions about the rewriting of popular history and the resistance to it through voluntary international collaboration. Imbibing the spirit of the Nouvelle Vague as well as the road movies of Monte Hellman, Ron Rice and Wim Wenders, Wikiriders embraces the fact that it’s largely discovered on the editing table. Fun, experimental and very accessible. [WP: Berlin Critics’ Week]

 

8. Kajolrekha (Giasuddin Selim, Bangladesh)

Adapted from a medieval folk ballad from the Mymensingh region of present-day Bangladesh, Giasuddin Selim’s sumptuous, widescreen musical fairytale Kajolrekha is a melodrama in the etymological sense of the word: music + drama. The film employs nearly twenty songs, sung by characters and narrators alike, to advance the plot, deepen emotions, comment on actions and, at points, critically distance the viewer from the story. Bankrupted by his gambling addiction, merchant Dhwaneshwer is given a second chance when a mysterious monk gifts him a soothsaying bird. The bird restores Dhwaneshwer’s lost glory, but also instructs him to exile his 13-year-old daughter Kajolrekha. Forced to lead a life of anonymity and hardship, Kajolrekha perseveres until the tides turn, even if it means paying a heavy price. Selim’s actors adopt a precisely stylized repertoire of theatrical gestures, postures and voice tones to express the essence of their roles, be they slaves, merchants or aristocrats. This conscious revival of a classical narrative tradition isn’t carried out ironically, but with a modernist sense of the latent possibilities of a lost artform. Moving tragically flawed characters across a perfectly orchestrated chessboard of fate and destiny, Kajolrekha reaffirms the inevitability of a just and benevolent world. [WP: commercial release]

 

9. Sleep #2 (Radu Jude, Romania)

Culling from four seasons’ worth of footage from EarthCam’s live-stream of Andy Warhol’s tomb in Pennsylvania, Radu Jude fashions a spiritual sequel to Warhol’s blockbuster of boredom, Sleep (1964). Where the older film turned the dormant body of Warhol’s lover into a monument comparable to the Empire State Building, Jude’s film, almost equally unwatchable, fixates on Warhol’s own body repurposed into a public monument. As fans and curious passersby click pictures, pose flowers, decorate it with Campbell soup cans and even organize parties around it, the artist’s tomb becomes something like a collective work of art, vested with a social signification. A modern cinematic readymade, Jude’s desktop documentary crafts an unassuming essay on celebrity and fame, entirely in line with Warhol’s work. What happens when television ceases to be the arbiter of mass taste and simply becomes the condition of everyday life? Not fifteen minutes, but the possibility of eternal fame? Just as the visitors bestow the grave with meanings it doesn’t possess in itself, the act of watching the live-stream turns out to be the means by which operational images become aesthetic objects. Critically interrogating spectatorship, Jude’s fascinating film affirms the triumph of life over eternal sleep. [WP: Locarno International Film Festival]

 

10. Journey of the Shadows (Yves Netzhammer, Switzerland)

Once living a life of harmony in a dystopian world, two bipedal figures – humanlike but featureless, genderless – fall out under the influence of a mystical pet fish. One of them perishes, and the other embarks on an odyssey across the seas, intermittently led by a book and a candle. After countless catastrophes, this wandering being washes ashore on a pristine island, where it tries to overcome its loneliness, alas in vain. This probably isn’t what happens in Swiss multimedia artist Yves Netzhammer’s wordless, mind-bending first feature, in which identities, relations and situations are in such a flux as to resist any kind of linear synopsis. Where traditional animation advances evermore towards a utopian combination of naturalism and expressivity, Journey operates at a zero degree of digital image-making, dealing in primitive figures, bald volumes, harsh lighting, rudimentary physics, sickeningly unmodulated colours, oneiric movements, and an oppressive clarity of visual field recalling Dali or Magritte. At its best, Netzhammer’s abstract film has the subversive, Kafkaesque quality of Central European animation from the 1960s and ‘70s. Defying binaries of nature/civilization, human/technology, organic/synthetic, Journey crafts a deeply disturbing meditation on freedom, creation and self-discovery whose brutality shocks all the more in a universe so unreal.  [WP: International Film Festival Rotterdam]

 

Special Mention: Dahomey (Mati Diop, Senegal/Benin/France)

 

Favourite Films of

2023 • 2022 • 2021 • 2020 • 2019 • 2015

2014 • 2013 • 2012 • 2011 • 2010 • 2009

 

June 29, 2024

Maya Miriga (1984)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Review | Tags: , , , , , |
[7] Comments 

Forty years after its original premiere, the Odia film Maya Miriga (1984), a touchstone of the Parallel Cinema movement, will be presented in a restored version at the Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bolonga, Italy, in June. Directed by Nirad Mohapatra (1947–2015), Maya Miriga was part of the Critics Week at the Cannes Festival in 1984, alongside such titles as Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts and Leos Carax’s Boy Meets Girl. The film has been restored by the Film Heritage Foundation (FHF) at the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna, in association with Digital Film Restore and Prasad Corporation in Chennai.

A graduate of the 1971 batch of the Film and Television Institute of India, Mohapatra made numerous documentaries, television series, industrial and educational films across his three-decade career, but Maya Miriga remained his sole fictional feature. “I had conceived the idea [for the film] in one of my intense moments of loneliness and deep depression and it had undergone several changes in various phases.”, notes the filmmaker. Shot by Rajgopal Mishra in a warm, sober colour palette, the film demonstrates a great feeling for the interplay of harsh natural light and deep shadows — a sensuous quality that can be appreciated fully in the pristine new version.

Set in the town of Puri, Maya Miriga is the saga of a joint family driven to disintegration by ambition, opportunity, festering resentment and, simply, changing times. A stern but honest headmaster on the brink of retirement, Raj Kishore Babu (Bansidhar Satpathy) lives in a fairly capacious house with his elderly mother, wife and five children: the dull and reliable college lecturer Tuku, the IAS hopeful Tutu, the self-doubting MA graduate Bulu, the rebellious and cricket-obsessed Tulu and the only daughter Tikina. While the men pore over files or hang out on the terrace, Prabha, Tuku’s wife, bears the burden of the upkeep of the house. The apparent stability of the home comes undone when Tutu cracks the civil service examination.

The narrative spans many months and proceeds by substantial leaps in time. We witness Tutu becoming a bigshot who marries into money, Prabha suffocating under the patriarchal order of the house, Tulu trying to break out on his own, Bulu imploding when surrounded by high achievers and Raj Babu grappling with post-career emptiness.

Through gradual buildup of dramatic detail, the film shapes into a poignant tragedy of a middle-class family torn apart by its own cherished values. The father’s insistence on academic excellence, the pressure on the sons to find respectable jobs, the irreconcilable expectations of wealth and traditionalism from the daughters-in-law — all turn out to be ticking time bombs for the household.

We also learn that the family has property back in their ancestral village that no one takes care of, suggesting that Raj Babu is himself a migrant who left his landlord father for greener pastures in Puri. Mohapatra’s film thus captures a crucial moment in Indian social history between two generations of labour migration, one giving rise to joint families inhabiting independent houses in towns and the other producing nuclear families looking towards metropolises.

Maya Miriga is a veritable compendium of middle-class mores and codes of behaviour: how do individuals get their decision ratified by other members of the family, what are one’s duties when returning home after a stroke of success, how should guests comport themselves when visiting? With finesse and grace, Mohapatra’s film illuminates the gendered division of labour, the intergenerational etiquette and the power hierarchy that holds sway in an undivided family.

An abandoned site spruced up for the film, the house itself plays a central role, exercising a gravitational pull that the characters struggle to escape. Actors move in and out of its dark recesses, as though consumed and spat out by the structure. Its imposing pillars, its bright courtyard and its open terrace all seem extensions of the power relations binding its inhabitants.

Maya Miriga is certainly a melodrama, but on a subtler register than seen on most Indian screens. The influence of Satyajit Ray, especially of a work like Mahanagar (1963), is discernible here, but Mohapatra’s film also shares lineage with the innumerable family dramas of contemporary theatre and popular cinema across the country. “The balance that I ultimately wanted to achieve”, the director remarks, “was between realism and simplicity on the one hand and my preoccupation with a certain cinematic form on the other.”

An admirer of Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, Mohapatra strips away his material of all dramatic fireworks. The non-professional actors are all filmed in mid-shots, and never in close-ups, in a way that integrates them with their surroundings. Their emotions are muted; the dialogue, music and reactions whittled down to a minimum. A sense of serenity reigns over the film, which progresses with relative equanimity through both joys and sorrows.

“The question, to my mind is an ethical one – to excite the senses to the point of disturbing their rational thinking is a certain sign of disrespect to the audience.”, writes Mohapatra, proposing that filmmakers must leave the viewers “a margin to move closer to the work and have a more active participation, a greater sense of involvement in the process.” “I believe, freedom is alienated in the state of passion.”, he adds, “One should not therefore seek to overwhelm the audience.”

Maya Miriga represents the FHF’s second restoration project this year after Shyam Benegal’s Manthan (1976), which had its premiere in the Classics section of the Cannes Film Festival in May. Carried out in association with Sandeep Mohapatra, the filmmaker’s son, the restoration process was long and arduous. The original 16mm camera negatives, found abandoned in a warehouse in Chennai, were severely compromised and had to be manually repaired over several months before it could be scanned in Bologna. The results were complemented with material from a 35mm print of the film from the National Film Archive in Pune, which also served as the source for the soundtrack. With the revival of this seminal film, Odia cinema promises to draw much needed attention from the rest of the country as well as the world.

 

[First published in Mint Lounge]

 

May 24, 2024

Showcase: It’s All in Your Head (Dhruv Solanki, 2023)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Curator's Corner | Tags: , , , |
Leave a Comment 

[Part of Curator’s Corner, a section dedicated to showcasing work of emerging and marginal filmmakers. See here for details.]

“What if the Kardashians were born in a rural Rajasthani family and lived in Baroda on a budget?” So goes the logline for Dhruv Solanki’s beguiling debut feature It’s All in Your Head (2023), now available for rent on Gudsho in India and on NoBudge in the US.

A family movie, it is, but perhaps unlike any other. At the centre of this carefree comedy are two sets of real-life siblings from the Rajpurohit clan: freelance photographer Jyotsana, the largely absent Deepshikha and aspiring model Bonita who are cousins to office worker Bhagyashree, model Manshree and wannabe dancer Bhuvnesh. They live in two different flats in suburban Baroda, Gujarat, but they seem more at home on Instagram, where they run a thrift store. The film, which opens with an Insta live session, will follow the six characters over the course of a day, charting their individual hopes and frustrations in both the professional and domestic spheres: applications, rejections, flirtations, confrontations, breakups and reconciliation, the whole deal. Any two of the six siblings would periodically appear together, but the whole gang is never to be seen under a single roof.

A self-taught filmmaker, Solanki grew up in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, and trained as an engineer before teaching chemistry. When he moved to Baroda, he was working on a script about young male hopefuls, but that changed when he came in contact with the Rajpurohits through a common friend. As someone with little interest in social media, Solanki found the sisters’ lives as far removed from his own as possible. “But, ultimately, I realized we were the same,” he remarks, pointing to the common struggles with money and family approval that he was also experiencing at the time.

Some of the names involved in the film aren’t new to this blog. Bonita Rajpurohit is one of the actors in Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex aur Dhokha 2 (2024). Dhruv Solanki and Jyotsana Rajpurohit play the leads in Petals in the Wind (2024) by Abdul Aziz, who is credited for the subtitles in It’s All in Your Head. Solanki’s film bears certain similarities to Aziz’s work. Shot on a smart phone with non-actors in real locations and sync sound, it weaves a loose fiction over a bedrock of documentary details, stripped off the kind of stylization we see in even the most realist of mainstream cinema.

But where Aziz chooses a hyper-naturalist mode predicated on uninterrupted chunks of real-time (in)action, Solanki’s film takes the opposite route in terms of technique and tone. Avoiding long takes or complex camera movements, it instead progresses in a series of static or nearly static shots. Sequences sometimes unfold in master shots, but are generally broken down into close ups and mid-shots with odd eyelines. The most pronounced element is the music, composed of an assortment of genres — Hong Sang-soo-esque classical pieces, jazz, Latino, soft rock numbers — at times suggesting hidden emotional undercurrents, but mostly lending a frivolous, sitcom-like texture to the film.

All this nudges the film into Mumblecore territory that seems to be experiencing a new surge in Indian independent filmmaking of late: low-budget productions about the sexual hangups and romantic foibles of young urban professionals. It’s All in Your Head, however, doesn’t have the psychological penetration and fine-grained performances that characterized Mumblecore cinema. Notwithstanding the emotionally resonant final stretch, the actors themselves seem to barely believe in the story they are participating in.

What it lacks in acting prowess, It’s All in Your Head makes up for in the exciting discrepancy it sets up between reality and fiction. Solanki’s film takes a particular familial reality, wraps it in a loose swathe of fiction only in order to get back to a deeper reality. Like Aziz’s films, it presents the lifeworld of a certain class of suburban Indian youth — one firmly embedded in an image economy — with an endearing candour, featuring dialogue, locations and body types that we seldom see on screen. “What I felt responsible towards was the energy and essence of each person,” says Solanki, adding that he wanted to capture the way each sibling negotiated different environments. To this end, he shot dozens of exercises, following the sisters in their routine, making them play out pre-written roles or filming them in real-life situations and gatherings.

Solanki’s film stands out in how it thrusts viewers into a microcosm with its own laws, not offering outsider perspectives from which to judge its inhabitants. It challenges us to place these characters socially — there’s little sense here of the normative world of parents or neighbours — and derives much of its appeal out of the incongruence between their aspirational lifestyles and the mundane reality of the world around them: Bonita lounging in a nightgown in a cramped flat, the punk-like Jyotsana walking up the stairs of a certain Sai Vihar apartments, Manshree and her sister eating by a roadside chat joint, or any of them making rotis in the kitchen. Bonita’s transness is taken for granted, as is the social bubble they all seem to move around in. Solanki confesses that he isn’t as interested in the conflict between the characters and their world as in the one they have with and within themselves. It’s all in their head.

Marching to a private beat, the siblings seem to have carved out their own Malibu in mofussil Gujarat. Are we in a utopia, a Baroda that isn’t, but could be? Is the film defiance or wish-fulfilment? It’s All in Your Head offers an unusual, idiosyncratic vision of small-town India: not rotting in backward biases, but scrappy, hungry and punching above its weight.

 

Bio

Dhruv Solanki is a writer-director based in Vadodara, Gujarat. He has co-written and directed Blah Blah Blah, an independent comedy currently in post-production. He developed The Rebels of Shakambhari, a period action feature, as a fellow of the Writers Ink Screenwriting Lab. It was an official selection at the Cinephilia Film & TV development workroom and was also invited to participate in Rewrite, a screenwriting residency lab. It’s All in Your Head is his debut feature as a writer and director.

Contact

dhruvsolanki.1719@gmail.com | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

Filmography

  • Hashim Khan (2018), 26 min., digital
  • Parichay (2019), 2 min., digital
  • Love (2021), 1 min., smartphone
  • Scenes from a Room (2021), 5 min., smartphone
  • Drink (2022), 10 min., smartphone
  • My India (2022), 3 min., smartphone
  • It’s All in Your Head (2023), 84 min., smartphone
  • Blah! Blah! Blah! (work-in-progress, co-dir. Bonita Rajpurohit), smartphone
  • Writer, The Rebels of Shakambhari (unproduced)
  • Writer, Home (unproduced)
  • Co-writer, Qualia (dir. Devankur Sinha), 2021
  • Actor, What a Difference a Day Made (dir. Devankur Sinha), 2022
  • Actor/co-writer, Pankhudiyaan (Petals in the Wind, dir: Abdul Aziz), 2024
  • Producer, If You Know You Know (dir. Bonita Rajpurohit), 2024

Showcase

Trailer for It’s All in Your Head (2023)

Love (2021)

Scenes from a Room (2021)

 

May 15, 2024

Navroze Contractor (1944-2023)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Filmmakers | Tags: , , , , , , |
1 Comment 

[The following essay was first published in Film Comment and was written for the Navroze Contractor tribute event at the Film at Lincoln Centre.]

In January 2023, the Experimenta Film Festival in Bangalore presented two films by the Yugantar Film Collective. Founded in 1980 by Deepa Dhanraj, Abha Bhaiya, Meera Rao, and Navroze Contractor, this short-lived feminist collective made half hour–long documentary-fiction hybrids on issues of domestic violence, grassroots resistance to deforestation, and labor organizing among maids and factory workers. While Dhanraj took questions from the audience after the screening, her husband and cinematographer, Contractor, remained seated at the very back of the auditorium among students and festival volunteers, speaking up only when Dhanraj deferred to him.

Something of this withdrawn, thoughtful quality permeates the work of Contractor, who died in a motorcycle accident in June 2023. A renowned still photographer, amateur percussionist, and jazz aficionado, not to mention a legendary motorcycling enthusiast who also wrote on the subject, the 79-year-old Contractor was widely remembered in his obituaries as a master raconteur who could charm an audience with his wit and intelligence. As a cameraman for the first generation of Indian documentaries made without state patronage, Contractor was one of the key image-makers of Indian independent cinema. The insightful, non-patronizing films that he shot for Dhanraj and other documentarians in the ’80s, attentive to life on the ground and sensitive to historical context, may be said to embody the first stirrings of a democratic visual media movement in the country.

Born in 1944, Contractor grew up in Ahmedabad, in the western Indian state of Gujarat, and was trained in painting and photography at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda. He applied to the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune—the country’s premier film school, and alma mater of stalwarts like Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Kumar Shahani, and Shabana Azmi—to study cinematography, but he could only get a seat in the direction department. However, under the tutelage of the illustrious archivist P.K. Nair, who founded the National Film Archive of India, Contractor learned the ropes of cinematography and lab processing outside the curriculum. When a strike by the institute’s Acting students led to classes being canceled in 1969, the young man dropped out of his course to pursue a career in photography.

In the late ’60s, Contractor was employed by the Ford Foundation as a still photographer to document their socio-economic development projects in Punjab. The color slides that Contractor produced as part of this stint caught the eye of filmmaker and fellow FTII alumnus Mani Kaul, who told the cameraman that if he ever made a color film, Kaul would enlist him—a promise that came to fruition when the director’s regular cinematographer K.K. Mahajan dropped out of Duvidha (1973) because it was to be shot on a Bolex camera under “amateur” conditions.

That Kaul entrusted the cinematography of his first color film to someone who’d never shot a movie before is astounding given the delicate beauty of what they accomplished together. Based on a short story of the same name by acclaimed writer Vijaydan Detha, Duvidha centers on the dilemma of a taciturn teenage bride (played by Raisa Padamsee) whose miserly husband goes away on business a day after their wedding. Smitten by the bride at first sight, a ghost inhabiting a nearby tree takes the form of the absent husband and moves in with her. Things come to a head when the real husband gets wind of the impostor back home.

Partly financed by the leading lady’s father, the painter Akbar Padamsee, Duvidha was shot on 16mm Kodachrome II reversal stock (later blown up to 35mm) in the village of Borunda in Rajasthan, not far from Kaul’s birth city of Jodhpur. “We had very little money, just two sun guns for lights, a Uher non-sync tape recorder, no trolley and tracks… nothing,” Contractor recalled in an interview. Since Borunda was home to Detha, who personally requested the villagers’ cooperation, they were willing to comply with special requests from the film crew, such as painting all the houses of the village white or not turning on their lights at night so that the shooting could proceed without hiccups.

Inspired by the approach to space in Indian miniature painting, Kaul and Contractor sought to disrupt linear perspective as the basis for their image construction. This influence is perhaps most apparent in the film’s many high-angle shots in which the camera adopts the elevated “balcony view” characteristic of miniature paintings, while also suggesting the point of view of the ghost on the tree. With these off-kilter flourishes, sudden changes of scale, extreme foreshortening, deliberate underlighting, and partial framing of faces, Duvidha demands constant visual readjustment on the part of the viewer.

“Often when a camera movement had to be made,” Contractor said of Kaul in an interview, “he would sing in my ear, that was my speed, rhythm of the shot.” While the director asked Contractor to pan the camera only horizontally or vertically—never diagonally—the actors’ bodies, the staircases, and the oblique eyelines nevertheless produce a warped perspective with strong diagonals. The most striking visual element of the film may be the freeze-frames that Kaul employs to telescope the narrative. But equally notable are the various zooms, used at key moments to intimate the supernatural dimensions of the story—most memorably in the shot in which Padamsee, clad in a red saree and leaning against a white wall, stares back blankly into the telescoping lens.

The consistent use of roving zooms is perhaps the single most recognizable aspect of Contractor’s cinematography, and in his documentary work with the Yugantar Film Collective, he elevated this device into something like a modus operandi. The handheld zoom provided Contractor the nimbleness required in such dynamic situations as the conferences, rallies, and strikes that he often found himself recording. A remarkable shot at the end of Tobacco Embers (1982), lasting more than five minutes without a cut, offers a shining example. As a group of women discuss strategies for an upcoming protest, the camera travels from face to face—now zooming into one speaker, now darting over to the next. Within the film’s fly-on-the-wall framework, the zoom lens allows Contractor to move seamlessly between the individual and the collective, between consensus and dissent.

By the time he came to work on Sanjiv Shah’s Love in the Time of Malaria (1992), Contractor had shot more than 20 documentary works of varying length, including ones made by Shah, and five narrative features. Shot largely in Contractor’s hometown of Ahmedabad, Love in the Time of Malaria takes place in the fictional kingdom of Khojpuri and charts the fortunes of Hunshilal (Dilip Joshi), a young scientist who follows the king’s call to develop a concoction to eliminate “dissident” mosquitoes from the country. Hunshilal succeeds in his mission, but when he falls in love with a fellow scientist and underground revolutionary, his loyalties are challenged.

Shah’s film may be described as a “political musical comedy,” but that wouldn’t do justice to the sui generis work that it is. Blending a host of genres and expositional modes, it brings together archival footage, documentary sequences, musical numbers, and absurd vaudeville-like tableaux into an unholy composite that plays as broad, blunt satire. Brimming with references to contemporary personalities and events, Love in the Time of Malaria sharply encapsulates the anxieties of India in the early 1990s, a period marked by religious strife and economic liberalization—principal forces that have shaped, and continue to shape, present-day India.

The eclectic form of the film is reflected in its heterogeneous visual texture: pastel-colored sequences in serene daylight rub shoulders with grainy archival clips, seductively lit indoor musical numbers, and gritty street photography. The cinematographer of the spectral Duvidha and the steely Yugantar documentaries may have been particularly well-suited for this unique mix of granite and rainbow, of fable and hard fact. An example: as an exhortatory poem about dissent is recited on the soundtrack (by iconic Indian actor Naseeruddin Shah), the camera zoom-pans across a shipyard full of toiling workers, stopping finally at a narrator in a hard hat who breaks into a song.

Like many cinematographers, Contractor was a protean professional who adapted his technique and style to the needs of individual films and filmmakers. He made both single-shot films about local artisans and narrative features with no camera movement, such as Vishnu Mathur’s austere study of bachelor anomie Pehla Adhyay (1981). Though he cut his teeth on 16mm, he also studied video production at Sony Corporation in Tokyo in the 1980s and later shot one of the earliest Indian films in high-definition digital video, Chetan Shah’s English-language campus thriller Framed (2007). From embedded documentaries to low-budget fiction to works of high modernism, Contractor has left behind an eclectic body of cinematographic work, spanning almost half a century, unified by its fierce independence from the commercial mainstream.

 

May 7, 2024

Showcase: The Orchard and the Pardes (Renu Savant, 2024)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Curator's Corner | Tags: , , , |
Leave a Comment 

[Part of Curator’s Corner, a section dedicated to showcasing work of emerging and marginal filmmakers. See here for details.]

Ever since the Sunday in 1895 when Louis Lumière photographed workers streaming out of the gates of his factory in Lyon-Monplaisir, the history of cinema has been tied up with issues of labour, leisure and workplace surveillance. In the century that followed, the image-making tools sometimes made it to the hands of the workers themselves, or to those of sympathetic filmmakers speaking on their behalf, throwing open questions around representation, ethics and consent. Who wields the camera? Who is the subject? Who holds sway over whom? Can an employee, especially dependent on the next paycheque, ever withhold permission to be filmed? Is consent paramount when filming people bound by lopsided contracts?

These questions all surface vividly in Renu Savant’s compelling new documentary The Orchard and the Pardes (Bageecha aur Pardes, 2024). An alumna of the Film and Television Institute of India, Savant is a Mumbai-based independent artist with an acute awareness of the complications of her practice and positionality. Her most prominent undertaking is the four-hour-long feature Many Months in Mirya (2017), shot in her ancestral village in coastal Maharashtra in Western India. A warm and unassuming pastoral diary film, Many Months in Mirya surveys not just the social fabric and the rhythm of life in this heterogenous village, but also the visual and aural experience of living in the place, in addition to its history, politics and ecology. Interweaving microscopic details and macroscopic events, it crafts a cinema of the land, demonstrating that a work of art can limit itself to a few square kilometres and still discover the world underneath.

The Orchard and the Pardes is set in a private mango orchard outside the town of Ratnagiri, one of the epicentres of mango production in the country, not far from Mirya. It follows the everyday activities of immigrant workers who come down to Ratnagiri from Nepal every year during the harvest season. We see the workers gathering the fruits, pruning trees and carrying out whatever tasks their Marathi-speaking employer assigns them. To get through their arduous days under a beating sun, they drink locally brewed liquor, talk over the phone or sing songs. It is the summer of 2021 and the pandemic is posing a threat to both the men’s livelihood and their timely return home.

Discussing what The Orchard and the Pardes is about risks reducing it to an issue-based documentary. Savant’s film is instead animated by the spaces in between people, each shot a record of the shifting dynamics of trust, power and language between the filmmaker, the workers and their employer. An opening intertitle clarifies the social position of the filmmaker: “The film is a document of the conditions of migrant labour in Konkan, Maharashtra, India. The film is also about the encounter between an urban woman filmmaker from the dominant caste and rural, Bahujan caste men from a male-dominated, agro-business field.”

As a lone woman engaging with an all-male environment, Savant finds herself in a complex power equation with the people she is filming. For the workers, she appears first as an emissary of their employer, and the camera a surveillance device. Their natural distrust of her presence leads them to perform for the camera, on the one hand, and take refuge in their native Nepali tongue, on the other. Throughout, we see them saying one thing to Savant in Hindi and adding something else among themselves in Nepali, despite their awareness that everything they utter could be translated. These quips, often teasing the filmmaker and sometimes of a lewd nature, are subtitled post-facto for us, but Savant herself doesn’t fully understand what is being said during the shoot.

At the same time, a sexual tension permeates the air, with these anxious bachelors sizing up the filmmaker, wondering what a single woman is doing in their midst. The threat becomes palpable in one particular sequence, in which Savant’s reticent camera records the group of men drinking during their break. With alcohol lowering the workers’ inhibitions, the camera turns into a kind of protective shield for the filmmaker, now comparably vulnerable and out of place as the workers are in Ratnagiri.

For the employer, whom we don’t see as much as the workers, the filmmaker is a potential embarrassment, someone who could record unflattering things that the labourers have to say about him or the unfair working routine he is putting them through. He is withdrawn, but his power is felt in the instructions he gives and in the workers’ testimonies of how ruthless and money-minded he is. We also sense that he has the capacity to evict the filmmaker were things to go out of control.

This three-way tug-of-war between the workers, their employer, and the filmmaker is embodied perfectly in a shot in which the camera gazes up at one of the men on a tree trying to cut down a branch. It is a dangerous job that the worker, speaking into a lapel mic, is reluctant to do despite the boss’ insistence. As he unwillingly completes the task, barely avoiding a major mishap, the filmmaker records the scene perched next to the employer. In this particular instance, the three stakeholders seem to have expectations that are orthogonal to each other. Standing shoulder to shoulder with the employer, the camera monitors the worker, while also potentially incriminating the employer for the hazardous working conditions he has put in place. But the camera itself isn’t beyond reproach. While it may not wish for an accident, the act of filming nonetheless produces a voyeuristic moment pregnant with high drama.

Despite these standoffish situations, a gradual trust develops between the filmmaker and the workers. The camera’s presence seemingly allows the men to carve out moments of leisure and imagination from their regimented schedule, and over time, they feel secure enough to talk ill of their boss or to plan to abuse him verbally. To be sure, this isn’t total solidarity, and the workers are never beyond playing the filmmaker for a fool, such as when they pass off popular Nepali songs as their own. But there is a modicum of affection and mutual respect that becomes apparent.

Part of the reciprocity has to do with language, particularly poetry. One of the workers, Kushal, says that he likes to make up songs during work — a claim that the filmmaker pursues, urging him to pen down his poems in a notebook. While he begins by claiming authorship to popular Nepali numbers, as time passes, he comes to make them his own, even writing original lines for them. Kushal’s vulnerability as he reads his original compositions for the camera, risking ridicule by the other boys, is touching. And it is the filmmaker’s intervention that makes this unveiling possible.

The Orchard and the Pardes offers a virtual compendium of the roles that the documentary camera has historically assumed: a device for capitalistic surveillance, a tool for journalistic exposé and academic knowledge production, and finally a poetic instrument probing beneath surface appearances. Rather than a fly on the wall observing an inviolable reality, the camera becomes a fly in the soup, self-consciously catalysing the reality it sets out to document. Within the outline of an ethnographic portrait, Savant’s deceptively simple film manages to explore fundamental undercurrents coursing through all of documentary cinema.

The Orchard and the Pardes had its world premiere at the Kolkata People’s Film Festival earlier this year and is awaiting its international showing.

 

Bio

Renu Savant’s film work has centred on methodologies of video documentation and reflexivity and story-telling in fiction. While a student at the Film and Television Institute of India, she was the winner of two National Film Awards in 2012 and 2015 respectively for her short fiction films, and other awards such as the Special Jury Mention at IDSFFK, 2011, and the 3rd National Students’ Film Award for Best Short Film in 2015. Her film Many Months in Mirya received the John Abraham National Award for Best Documentary, 2017, and an invitation to the Yokohama Triennale, 2020. In 2020, BAFTA selected her for their Breakthrough India programme.

Contact

renusavant@gmail.com | Instagram

Filmography

  • Darkroom (2008), 16 min., DV
  • Airawat (2011), 10 min., 35mm
  • Aaranyak (2014), 22 min., 35mm
  • Many Months in Mirya (2017), 230 min., HD digital
  • Mod Bhaang (The Ebb Tide) (2019), 60 min., HD digital
  • Brave Revolutionary Redubbed (co-directed with Kush Badhwar) (2020), 20 min., HD digital
  • Crime and Expiation by JJ Granville or How to Shoot an Open Secret? (2021), 10 min., HD digital
  • Bageecha aur Pardes (The Orchard and the Pardes) (2024) 116 min., HD digital

Showcase

Excerpt from The Orchard and the Pardes (2024)

Mod Bhaang (The Ebb Tide) (2019)

Aaranyak (2014)

https://vimeo.com/92515193/7efea486c9?share=copy

Airawat (2011)

https://vimeo.com/94201873/33371e96bc?share=copy

 

 

 

Next Page »