What to watch at MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2024: ‘This year, MAMI is just MAMI, not Jio MAMI’, MAMI goes independent

MAMI 2024, to be held in Mumbai from October 19-24, will see an array of more than 110 independent films from more than 45 countries.

MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, organised by the public trust Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI), has gone through many phases of transitions since its inception in 1999. This year marks yet another, as the festival goes independent, without a title sponsor, after their 10-year association, as per the business plan, with telecommunications major Jio came to an end this year. After outgoing festival director Anupama Chopra, Film Heritage Foundation founder-director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur has stepped into her shoes as the interim festival director. Dungarpur says, “This year MAMI is a very concentrated MAMI. This year, MAMI is just MAMI, not Jio MAMI. The festival, now, has very limited funding yet we were able to do a festival of this nature, with this kind of programming.”

One of the things that is important for the festival is that in a limited space, one can interact and meet film directors and industry people. One of Asia’s most esteemed cinematic events, MAMI 2024 edition will showcase an exciting line-up of films, to be screened in Regal and all the five screens of Juhu PVR, from October 19-24. Over six days, more than 110 films from 45-plus countries and in 50-plus languages, will be screened, including fiction, documentary and animation, with many making their world, South Asia and India premieres at the festival.

Last year, MAMI had its biggest festival ever, with over 250 films and new segments. Building on the success of last year’s inaugural South Asia Competition, the Main Competition section will continue to spotlight strong independent voices from South Asia and its diaspora. The line-up features 11 films, seven from South Asia and diaspora and four from India, with five of the competing directors being women. Two of the entries are official Oscars submissions from their respective countries: Sandhya Suri’s Santosh (starring India’s Shahana Goswami and Sunita Rajwar) from the UK and Min Bahadur Bham’s Shambhala from Nepal. Many countries’ Oscar entries will have their Asia premiere at MAMI. Also from Nepal is Deepak Rauniyar’s Venice Film Festival-returned Pooja, Sir. There are other categories like World Cinema, the non-competitive Focus South Asia, Gala Premieres, Restored Classics, Tribute, Dimensions Mumbai, Royal Stag Barrel Select Large Short Films, Masterclasses and Industry Programmes.

The festival is bookended by two Cannes winners. “The festival is opening with Payal Kapadia’s film, All We Imagine As Light (AWIAL), which is the Grand Prix [winner, 2024; a first for India]. It is very important because that’s the film which we should be celebrating. It’s the biggest win India had in any year, anywhere. And we were keen that an Indian film should be at the helm of the opening. And Anora, the Sean Baker film, which won the main prize (Palme d’Or) at Cannes [Film Festival, 2024] is the closing film,” says Dungarpur. For AWIAL (distributed in India by Rana Daggubati’s Spirit Media), about the dreams of millions of invisible migrants who come to Mumbai with the hope of improving their lives, opening this Mumbai festival, where people will buy a ticket to watch this indie, is a homecoming.

“The idea of the festival has moved, it has changed. This year, Payal Kapadia’s film sets the tone for the festival, it sets the tone for independent cinema. Far more of that kind of cinema would be seen. I think the festival is going in the right direction in showing and showcasing the best of cinema in India, and our regional cinema. That is one thing which has so beautifully come out this year. The real Indian ethos and culture is within our Indian cinema, our regional cinema. That we have a whole lot of films. If you really look at the programming, every film is worth watching,” he further adds.

Kapadia’s AWIAL was one of the four contenders for France’s Oscars entry consideration (but lost out to Jacques Audiard’s crime musical Emilia Pérez, also showing at MAMI World Cinema segment) and among the Oscars entry longlist in India, where it lost out to Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies as India’s official Oscar entry. When asked about it, Dungarpur says, “It’s a difficult question to reply to because there were parameters which were set for why they chose Laapataa Ladies over Payal’s film, I do not know what really happened. But Payal Kapadia is not someone who’s really concerned about that…she’s made a strong independent film, which is doing the rounds across the world, it’s going everywhere and it’s getting applauds. Kiran Rao has made a nice film herself. So, it’s a very subjective matter. I think, every film is going to find its own place. If the difference was very heavy, if we were comparing it with another commercial film or something”, it would have been easier to judge or comment. Incidentally, Kiran Rao was the chairperson of MAMI in 2015. The current festival chairperson is Priyanka Chopra Jonas.

The festival this year pays tribute to two eminent film personalities who left the world recently: filmmaker and screenwriter Kumar Shahani (his film Tarang will be screened), who also taught at the Film and Television Institute of India, died in February 2024, and Sudhir Nandgaonkar, film writer and a pioneer of the film society movement in Maharashtra, who died last year. The festival will also organise a special screening of the film Arth (1982), directed by Mahesh Bhatt and starring Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil, Kulbhushan Kharbanda and Raj Kiran. A film, about how an extramarital affair wrecks three lives, bridged the arthouse and commercial gap back in the day. Shabana Azmi, who completes 50 years this year as an actor, which began with Shyam Benegal's Ankur (1974), will take a Masterclass, too.

An expansive World Cinema section will feature 41 films, some of the most acclaimed ones of this year. Highlights include The Room Next Door by Pedro Almodóvar, Emilia Pérez, The Substance by Coralie Fargeat, A Different Man by Aaron Schimberg, Cloud by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Harvest by Athina Rachel Tsangari, Suspended Time by Olivier Assayas, Rumours by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson & Galen Johnson, April by Dea Kulumbegashvili, and Universal Language by Matthew Rankin.

Do not miss Midhun Murali’s Kiss Wagon (South Asia Competition), the Malayalam animation cinematic odyssey (also screening at IFFK Kerala in December) which won the Special Jury Award and the FIPRESCI prize at the prestigious IFFR Rotterdam’s Tiger Competition earlier this year. Watch Rima Das’s Village Rockstars 2, which just won the prestigious Kim Jiseok Award, along with Tom Lin Shu-Yu's Yen and Ai-Lee, at the Busan International Film Festival. Also watch Shuchi Talati's Girls Will Be Girls, starring Kani Kusruti (who's also in AWIAL), which won two awards at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival: the World Cinema Dramatic Audience Award and World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Acting. Also watch Bulgarian director Konstantin Bojanov’s The Shameless (Focus South Asia) starring Anasuya Sengupta, who is the first Indian actor to win the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. Focus South Asia will also feature Maisam Ali’s In Retreat (first Indian film in ACID segment of Cannes Film Festival this year); Mansi Maheshwari’s Bunnyhood (which won the third prize at La Cinef, Cannes); Cédric Dupire’s experimental found-footage assemblage of Amitabh Bachchan, The Real Superstar; Lakshmipriya Devi’s Toronto-premiered Manipur children’s story Boong; Suruchi Sharma’s short film Skyward/Gagan Gaman. Also, do not miss Shonali Bose’s harrowing personal documentary A Fly on the Wall, where Bose is asked by her terminally-ill friend Chika Kapadia to film him as he ends his life with assisted suicide in Zürich.

Thithi maker Raam Reddy's Manoj Bajpayee starrer sophomore The Fable is not to be missed. There's cinematographer Udit Khurana's (Ghaath; The Hunt for Veerappan) directorial debut Taak, starring Jyoti Dogra. Tarun Jain’s Ballad of the Mountain is a sweet Kumaoni short about childhood and dreams. The out-of-competition Gala section features Despatch by Kanu Behl (starring Manoj Bajpayee, Shahana Goswami), Ghamasaan by Tigmanshu Dhulia (starring Arshad Warsi, Pratik Gandhi), Go Noni Go by Sonal Dabral (starring Dimple Kapadia, Manav Kaul), the anthology My Melbourne directed by Kabir Khan, Imtiaz Ali, Onir, Rima Das, and The Ancient (Puratawn) by Suman Ghosh (starring Sharmila Tagore, Rituparna Sengupta, and Indraneil Sengupta).

At MAMI this year, “We have continued the tradition of restored classics,” says Dungarpur, the filmmaker, film restorer and archivist, who started the non-profit Film Heritage Foundation in 2014, when “people didn’t even know what preservation and restoration was”. “Right from the beginning when we associated ourselves with the restoration of Uday Shankar’s Kalpana, that was our first association with Martin Scorsese, in 2012. That was the first proper restoration that was done. And they (Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation) have been big supporters of our (Film Preservation and Restoration) workshops that we have been doing. Our ninth edition is in Kerala in November (7-14),” he says.

The selection at MAMI Restored Classics includes Les Blank and Maureen Gosling’s Burden of Dreams, the cult documentary on the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982), a gold standard of behind-the-scenes filmmaking; Camp de Thiaroye (1988), directed by Thierno Faty Sow and the legendary Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, whose birth centenary was last year. The segment will also include two Indian gems restored by FHF: Girish Kasaravalli’s 1977 Kannada classic Ghatashraddha (The Ritual), which showed at Cannes Film Festival this year, and Nirad Mohapatra’s Odia film Maya Miriga (The Mirage; 1984), which showed at the Venice International Film Festival this year.

“Ghatashraddha was an interesting film because it was not only Martin Scorsese but George Lucas, too, who was interested in its restoration. Both were partnering (with FHF) to help get that film restored,” says Dungarpur. The FHF, he says, is “soon starting a centre in Ballard Pier (south Mumbai). We’ll open the film library, it will be a library-cum-archive, open to the public.” He promises great programming next year, from Scorsese’s Film Foundation, with big directors coming to India. FHF recently brought Giuseppe Tornatore to India with his restored film Cinema Paradiso (1988), and showed Australian filmmakers’ Baz Luhrmann and Peter Wier works. Dungarpur ends on a hopeful note: “MAMI will definitely be a very independent, very interesting festival this year which will show the best of Indian cinema,” he says.