All the Film Reccos You Need This Year
Dear Reader,
Regular people will tell you the festive season begins next week, with Diwali. For proper, honest-to-filminess cinephiles, however, the celebrations began last week with the JioMAMI Mumbai Film Festival.
The last two days of the film festival are now upon us, which is everyone’s last chance to catch some of the highlights from the line-up as well as the films that won awards at the festival. True to tradition, screens were house-full within seconds of opening up, but walk-in queues are always an option so don’t take the rejection from the booking system to heart.
First up, here are the winning titles, which were announced at yesterday’s closing ceremony:
Golden Gateway Award: Against the Tide by Sarvnik Kaur
Silver Gateway Award: Bahadur the Brave by Diwa Shah
IMDb Audience Choice Award: The Monk and the Gun by Pawo Choyning Dorji
Civic Studios Lights Camera Impact Award: Blackhole by Pradyumna Patil; Praan Pratishthana by Pankaj Sonawane. Special Mention: Flowering Man by Soumyajit Ghosh Dastidar.
NETPAC Award: Rimdogittanga (Rapture) by Dominic Sagma
Rashid Irani Young Critics’ Choice Award: Kayo Kayo Colour? by Shahrukhkhan Chavada
Gender Sensitivity Award: Baarir Naam Shahana by Leesa Gazi
Special Jury Prize: Agra by Kanu Behl
If you want more reccos — even if you can’t catch them at the festival, a lot of these films are likely to have theatrical and streaming releases in coming months — we’re verily overflowing with them after eight consecutive days of film-festing. Everyone grumbled about clashing films in the schedule, but the joy of well-curated festivals like JioMAMI is that the lineup is crammed with so many fantastic titles that whatever you get to watch tends to be a rewarding experience. This is why when you see the crowds coming out of a screening, everyone usually looks blissed out. Which is a stark contrast from how ferocious and/ or grumpy that same crowd looks when they’re lining up to enter a screening. This year, huge numbers turned up for films like Agra, Anurag Kashyap’s Kennedy and Vikramaditya Motwane’s Indi(r)a’s Emergency. Unsurprisingly, some venues saw mini stampedes, which is effectively the love language of JioMAMI delegates. Horrifyingly-long queues snaked out of every venue and Reader, I (Deepanjana) have never been more grateful for the privilege of being given one of those passes that lets you jump to the front of the line.
Thanks to my pass, I’ve been able to watch 28 films across five venues in far-flung parts of the city. Here are my top picks:
Perfect Days: Only Wim Wenders can take the life of a humble toilet cleaner in Japan and turn it into an elegant masterpiece. Koji Yakusho is outstanding as the film’s lead, who lends dignity to the simplest and most mundane tasks.
The World is Family and Bye Bye Tiberias: Both are documentaries, made by directors who turn their cameras on their parents. Both are wonderful, moving films that make you fall in love with the subjects. While Anand Patwardhan focuses more on the men in his family, Lina Soualem records the memories of women. Tremendously moving.
Evil Does Not Exist: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s film is a cautionary tale about greed, the importance of preserving the environment, and the blurred line that distinguishes being good from being zealous.
Design chief Spenta Wadia’s top three picks (FYI, she’s designed all the comics in this newsletter):
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End Of The World: A dark comedy (my favourite genre) with a very relatable lead character who at one point lets out a loooooong sigh and says, "I'm tired." I have not related to a character more than I did to her then and there.
The Pot-au-Feu: You can't go wrong with films and food. Throughout the film, I fully wanted to trade places with all those eating the exquisite meals being served up in the film. Glad I had lunch before entering the theatre that day.
Daaaaaali!: The entire film feels like you've suddenly stepped into Dali's art and mind. What I loved the most about this film is the clever way Dali's surrealism was brought to life. Not with art and graphics, but with smart editing, camera movements and storytelling.
Special Mention: Afire. “In My Mind” by The Wallners has been playing non-stop for the entire week, thanks to this film.
For a lot of our edit team, this was their first time at a film festival. Here’s what they found memorable.
Tanvi Lad:
Attending a film festival can be very intimidating. My first film was the Marathi film, Sthal by Jayant Digambar Somalkar. I reached the venue an hour prior to the screening, assuming I’d be the first in the walk-in queue. Except there were 30 people already waiting, making me the 31st in line. As the screening time came closer, I started feeling pangs of anxiety. Was the line moving too slowly? What I don’t get in?
Fortunately, I did make it in and I couldn’t have asked for a better film to inaugurate my festival experience than Sthal. Somalkar is one of those rare directors who shows his story through a woman’s gaze. Savita (fantastically portrayed by Nandini Chikte) is a final-year undergraduate student who is serious about her studies, but is being pushed towards marriage by her family. There’s a scene in the film where Savita’s parents take her to the community wedding program. Here, each prospective bride and groom introduce themselves to the huge crowd. When Savita walks on stage to present her marriage bio-data, her vulnerability and frustration is unmistakable, and you can't help but feel terrible for her. Sthal doesn’t give answers or solutions, choosing instead to hold up a mirror to rage, angst and reality of women in rural India.
Kaira H:
It is my first time film fest-ing, and let me tell you: It's a delightful blend of the bizarre and the heartwarming. In between films, you encounter fellow dreamers, those arty types with their curly hair and leather wristbands (you know the ones). There's intellectual banter, inside jokes, and some flirting. They tell you they LOVED Roma and HATED Anatomy of a Fall and you realise your filmy meet-cute is not meant to last. You shake it off, and get a sharing auto from Juhu circle and trade film recommendations on the way. You complain about sore feet or lack of sleep and then you help an old uncle take a selfie with his festival pass. Sure, it may not be a selfie anymore, but who has the heart to burst his bubble? You walk away, hoping to be this excited for a 10:00 pm show of an Albanian film when you're his age.
Top Three Picks:
Anatomy of a Fall: A sharp courtroom drama with impressively meticulous dialogue and some knockout performances from the entire cast, including Snoop the dog. Lives up to the hype and then some.
A Cup of Coffee and New Shoes On: A tender, heartbreaking film about deaf twin brothers about to lose their sight. Fair warning: it is an excruciating exploration of love, loss, grief, frustration, and fear.
Daaaaaali!: A non-stop laughter fest with an impeccable cast. For fans of absurd comedies and surrealism, Daaaaaali! is a dream come true :)
Sharanya Kumar:
This film festival has taught me that there's a very thin line between art and technical malfunction. When I was watching The Beast, there were moments in which the scene glitched, went back a few seconds and started over again, and then again. I was sure that this was a problem with the print. Except no. That was a deliberate narrative device by the director. Art, there’s no defining it, is there?
Top Three Picks:
Anatomy of a Fall: An exquisite break-down of power, guilt and eventually a marriage. A film that warrants every second of its run-time, and one that I immediately wanted to watch again.
The Monk and The Gun: Incredibly wholesome and gorgeously shot. I laughed out loud at many moments and left the theatre buoyant with joy.
The Cloud Messenger: A beautiful story of eternal love, with mythology, photography and everything in between.
Shruti J:
On Day 2, feeling cocky about my ability to travel across the city, I decided to go from one screening in Colaba to another in Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC). To catch Anand Patwardhan's documentary, The World is Family at BKC, I’d have to rush halfway across Mumbai in record time, which I did. At the venue, I saw a line outside the audi and felt a surge of relief. But once inside, there was something felt… off. I asked the man next to me if he was here for the documentary. He gave me a look."Hum yahaan Lagaan dekhne aaye hai (I’m here to watch Lagaan),” he said. So here’s my not-so-pro festival tip: Check the screen number on the schedule before hurtling in.
Top Three Picks:
Fallen Leaves: Aki Kaurismaki's deadpan comedy shows a series of encounters between a man and a woman who have fallen in love with the same rapid velocity with which one falls into a ditch. The charm of its simplicity is in how it sneakily crept up on me and dusted off all the romance-related cynicism.
Terrestrial Verses: Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami's film is a reminder that authoritarianism is not only terrifying, it is also gloriously stupid. Wicked, absurd and brilliant.
20,000 species of Bees: Estibaliz Surreloga Solaguren's film is a tender, and gentle portrait of eight-year-old Lucia, who is figuring out her identity as a trans girl. One of the most poignant moments of the film has her aunt tell her mother that she didn't impose on Lucia how she needs to think of gender.
This Week in Reviews
Here’s a little treat for you. We got The Streaming Guy — aka Suchin Mehrotra — to tell us about the new season of Aarya:
The Sherni is back.
Ram Madhvani’s Aarya, one of my favourite shows, returns to our lives with season 3. Well, the first four episodes of season 3 anyway. (Disney+Hotstar is doing that annoying "drop it in two parts" thing. Again.)
Let’s start with the good news. Aarya is still a well made and thoroughly engaging new instalment. The new season keeps you invested and entertained. The stakes remain high, the tension is forever escalating. Above all, the show remains immensely watchable largely because of, well, Aarya — both the character and what Sushmita Sen does with her, delicately oscillating between worried, compassionate mother and dreaded drug lord.
This time, writers Khushboo Raj, Amit Raj and Anu Aingh Choudhary sacrifice character, patience and depth at the altar of urgency and bingeability. And here, unfortunately, lies the rub. What was once a potent, nuanced balance of family and crime, motherhood and mafia, becomes an explosive, furiously-paced, plot-heavy series that lives in service of ensuring there’s never a dull moment; but by the same token, there’s also rarely a quiet one. The unrelenting narrative refuses to let scenes breathe and characters be. Instead of feeling like credible people, the characters in Aarya now are mere chess pieces, serving one big gut punch after another. The thing about opting for frenzied "punch punch punch" storytelling is that it can leave you feeling beaten and exhausted.
So while Aarya is thankfully still the same show (just about) in the third season, its essence feels diluted. The keen, thoughtful storytelling presence of creator Ram Madhvani feels watered down and what we’re left with at the end of the first set of episodes from this season is, at best, comfortable and familiar. While the story may be progressing, the big question is if this series really is evolving. ~ Suchin Mehrotra
For the rest of this week’s releases, head over to the Film Companion website:
That’s all from us this week. We’ll be back, same time, same place with next week’s newsletter and don’t forget to tell your friends to subscribe — this isn’t Fight Club and rules about secrecy don’t apply, so feel free to tell everyone you know.