HFF 2023: Don’t miss these 12 indie movies at the 15th Habitat Film Festival

The closing film on the opening day will be India’s Oscar-returned All That Breathes. For those of you in Delhi who missed out on watching Delhi boy Shaunak Sen’s Delhi film — the Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winner, Cannes’ L’oeil d’or-winner and Oscar-nominated documentary feature — on Disney+ Hotstar, after HBO bid adieu to India in March, can head to the Habitat festival (May 5, 9 pm, Stein Auditorium).

A film about Delhi and its noxious air, in which the majestic black kites are falling off the skies, and two brothers who resuscitate injured raptors, alongside a soap-dispenser business, from their home clinic, because bird hospitals turn away “non-vegetarian birds” and feeding meat to kites earns them sawab (religious credit, in Islam).

The film’s cinematographic compression and decompression bring alive the visual claustrophobia that is Delhi/India now, where buildings and humans stand cheek-by-jowl. How do the non-humans, or the more-than-humans, register their protest? This “fairy tale gone wrong” is also humorous at unlikely moments.

Also read: All That Breathes’ co-cinematographer Riju Das: ‘Shaunak, the editors were three kites hovering over a landfill of footages, carefully choosing’

This 10-day edition of the Habitat festival returns to its pre-pandemic form, of showcasing eclectic pan-Indian selection. The 15th edition will screen films across 17 Indian languages. Some of the festival highlights include the India premiere of his Rahat Mahajan’s English-language film Meghdoot/The Cloud Messenger, which competed in the prestigious Tiger Award competition at the 2022 International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR). Two Bengali films, Meghbari and Ghore Pherar Gaan, will also premiere.

In his birth centenary year, the arthouse director Mrinal Sen will be celebrated with a retrospective of his films (Khandhar, Ek Din Pratidin, Ek Din Achanak) and a panel discussion with his son Kunal Sen, and publisher Naveen Kishore on May 6, 4.15 pm. For most Dilliwallahs, this might be their only chance to watch Sen’s films in good print.

There’ll be a book release (Avijit Ghosh’s When Ardh Satya Met Himmatwala: The Many Lives of 1980s Bombay Cinema) and a special memoriam screening for those who have passed on this year, including actors Satish Kaushik and Uttara Baokar and director Pradeep Sarkar. Amartya Bhattacharyya’s (Adieu Godard) hat-tip to French New Wave pioneer Jean-Luc Godard, who died last year. There’ll be global-award-winning and Oscar-nominated films. There will be the entry India had sent to the Oscars, Pan Nalin’s Chhello Show/The Last Film Show.

Films about women who stand up for what’s right: Manish Mundra’s Siya, a small-town girl takes on the system to fight for justice; the class-gender oppression of a house help in Bengali short film Footprints, by Tathagata Ghosh, which won its lead Payel Rakshit the Critics’ Choice Award (best actress); Nithya Menen-starrer Malayalam film 19(1)(a) and the inimitable Sai Pallavi-helmed Tamil film Gargi.

There are films that show ancient practices and professions, from folk lore and real. Scorpion singers, healers who sing to heal scorpion stings bringing people back from death, may be mentioned in Rajasthani folk lore, but Iran is known for the use of traditional medicine for scorpions stings. Call it coincidence that Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani and the late Irrfan, who hailed from Rajasthan’s (Tonk, then Jaipur) — both actors par excellence — collaborated, along with Waheeda Rehman, on Anup Singh’s second and last Irrfan film, The Song of the Scorpions. Farha Khatun, whose documentary Holy Rights (2021) fetched a National Award, in her new short film, Ripples Under the Skin, trains the lens on Old Kolkata’s last-surviving bhistis (water carriers), a profession that’s on its deathbed.

There will be documentaries on artistes behind a mask: Utpal Borpujari’s France-premiered Mask Art of Majuli, about the Sattriya mask-making culture of Assam’s famed and world’s largest river island, and Geetika Narang Abbasi’s 2022 Rotterdam-premiered Urf/a.k.a, which closely follows the life of celebrity lookalikes or ‘The Juniors’ — Kishore Bhanushali aka Jr Dev Anand, Firoz Khan aka Jr Amitabh Bachchan, and Prashant Walde aka Jr Shah Rukh Khan. And, among the short films’ package will be the Cannes-returned Suman Sen’s 2021 Eka/The Silent Echo (La Fabrique Cinema) and Pratham Khurana’s 2022 Nauha (La Cinef).

While this year’s selection has an endless bounty of films, definitely watch the veteran arthouse director Mrinal Sen’s films, here are 12 independent films by young filmmakers that you should watch besides the aforementioned:

We are a family

Family

In his layered sixth film, the Vinay Forrt and Divya Prabha-starrer Family, which premiered in the Harbour strand at IFFR this February, Malayalam filmmaker Don Palathara studies the individual in relation to his community, his environment. The community here is a village (in Kerala’s Idukki), one big family, whose head is the omnipresent Church, which, like a panopticon, keeps surveillance. There’s a leopard on the prowl, literally and metaphorically, which the villagers are unable to catch, only the children can see. This is Vinay Forrt’s career-best performance till date. He’s extraordinary in his ordinariness, slithering in his vile innocence. Divya Prabha is the beating heart and voice of conscience in a silent community.

When: May 7, 4.30 pm, Stein Auditorium

Read full review: ‘Family’ and Don Palathara's ‘grey cinema’: Church, community, and the cunning

Ariyippu/Declaration

Divya Prabha steals the show, again, though Kunchacko Boban is equally good in editor-turned-director Mahesh Narayanan’s Locarno-premiered fourth feature film about a Malayalee couple working in a gloves factory in Noida while applying for their visa to go work abroad but are stuck owing to the pandemic. A doctored video of Reshmi (Prabha), circulated in the workers’ WhatsApp groups, puts her in a fix, roughs up matters at work and home. The film explores misogyny in both professional and personal spaces, and how a woman who’s seeking justice is victim-shamed, and fights a lone battle, silently.

When: May 12, 6.30 pm, Stein Auditorium

Tora’s Husband

National Award-winning Assamese filmmaker Rima Das’s Toronto-premiered Tora’s Husband, shot during the pandemic, moves away from her previous work, Village Rockstars (2017) and Bulbul Can Sing (2018). Those had adolescent and teenage protagonists, while in her third feature, she zooms in on adult characters, “a protagonist exposed to a larger world and has bigger concerns”.

Family, parenting, misunderstanding in relationships. It is not just a story about Tora’s husband but a reflection on life, love and loss. With Abhijit Das as the distre.ssed protagonist Jaan trying to make ends meet, and shot in Rima Das’s neighbourhood in Assam’s Chhaygaon, where she locates all her films, Tora’s Husband — directed, written, shot, edited by her — captures how COVID-19 impacted lives in a small town: lost livelihoods, soured relationships.

When: May 8, 6 pm, Stein Auditorium

Have and have nots

Photo

A still from Utsav Gonwar's Kannada film 'Photo'.

The national lockdown announcement in March 2020 saw escalating fear and confusion, and thousands of migrant labourers charting their way back home on foot, many reached, many could not. It propelled Utsav Gonwar to take a page out of the pandemic and make a film on the epic-scale tragedy that afflicted the entire country, and seems to have been forgotten by the administration and the privileged classes because it isn’t their experience, what else justifies the not-so-great earnings of Anubhav Sinha’s recent march-of-the-migrant film Bheed? Gonwar hails from Gonwar village in Raichur district of Kalyana-Karnataka (in north-east Karnataka region), most of these villagers go to Bengaluru for construction work. In his debut directorial film, Photo, which won the third prize at the recent Bengaluru International Film Festival, Gonwar, who works as an assistant director in the Kannada film industry, shows a father and son’s march-on-foot back from the big city. Do they reach home just as they had left? The 10-year-old village boy Durgya (Veeresh Gonwar) had only one dream, to get himself a photo in front of the Vidhana Soudha, which, in the greatest of ironies, has embossed on its building ‘Government’s Work is God’s Work’. Almost like visiting a temple, a trip to the seat of the state legislature is a matter of pride among the unlettered of this village, the schools, every household has a photo of it, a photo of his with the building will earn Durgya brownie points not just among his school buddies but in the village, too. His construction-worker father Gyana (the actor Mahadev Hadapad) tries his best, but the pandemic, the government and the police would not comply. Gonwar makes the film with great restraint, the sparse and drought-parched landscape and unforgiving summer sun add to the helplessness and hopelessness. As the adults give up hope, the child’s hope stays alive and keeps life going, until it can’t. This post-pandemic India story is not to be missed.

When: May 6, 2.15 pm, Stein Auditorium

Hadinelentu/Seventeeners

Seventeen is a slippery slope of an age. Neither a child nor an adult yet. Compellingly co-written with Anupama Hegde, Prithvi Konanur’s (Railway Children; Pinky Elli?) sixth film premiered at Busan, South Korea, and won the second prize at the recent Bengaluru International Film Festival. Hari (Neeraj Mathew) and Deepa (the superb Sherlyn Bhosale) are Class XII students at a government pre-college in Bengaluru. They indulge in sex in an empty classroom and record it on her phone. The video gets leaked, and lands on the internet. Faced with mudslinging that the said event has engendered, the school principal and vice-principal decide to expel the two. However, after an internal committee decision, the unanimous decision is to only expel the girl, because she has been a brat, allegedly roughed up other girls, she brings laurels in sports but isn’t good in studies, unlike the “good student” Hari, whose mother even lets on that he’s a religious boy who performs sandhya-aarti every evening, how can he bring disgrace? Hari is rich, Deepa is poor, her mother cooks in a government school. While the class divide may play a part, the gender discrimination founts from a mentality of ingrained caste distinction. Hari is a Brahmin and Deepa a Dalit. The film instantly pivots towards how insidiously caste operates and oppresses in urban spaces, something rarely seen on screen, and especially the intersection of class and caste. A gap that Ashim Ahluwalia tried to bridge with his recent OTT series Class. While that dwelt on the uber-rich society, a section that exists at a remove for a majority of Indians, and hence, it left the audiences divided on its excesses of imagination, Hadinelentu is far more accessible because what’s shown is what the masses live through, either as recipients or spectators. Deepa, Hari, their parents and the school get dragged to the court as the fight turns legal. And legal intricacies close in on all. Deepa being 18 unlike what her certificate says further complicates the plot.

When: May 11, 4.30 pm, Stein Auditorium

Sexual awakening/oppression

Amar Colony

Women are instantly desexualised the minute they age, become widows, physically invalid, or pregnant — all seen as teleological endpoints of female desire. Siddharth Chauhan’s 75-minute Estonia-premiered and FFSI KR Mohanan Awardee Hindi debut film is a feature upgrade of his short film Papa. It is the story of three women, from three generations, living in an old, British-era colonial building, with its bay windows and ageing, wooden staircases, in a hill town. A young pregnant Meera (Nimisha Nair), her risqué moments reminiscent of Madame Bovary’s or the Wife of Bath’s, a middle-aged wheelchair-bound widow Devki (Sangeeta Agarwal) with a pigeon for company, and the elderly Hanuman-devotee Durga (Usha Chauhan). Their ennui-riddled world limited to the said building, a wooden cage in itself, and they united by isolation and desolation. Delusion, chimeric stories, dreamlike sequences help each woman navigate her desire and disappointment.

When: May 9, 8.30 pm, Stein Auditorium

Read full review: Small town, big itch: In 'Amar Colony', Siddharth Chauhan turns a female gaze at desire

Jaggi

A shake-you-out-of-your-complacency Punjabi film. The Afghanistan-set Kite Runner (2007) had shown it but rarely has mainstream Punjabi or Hindi films dwelt upon male abuse. Sexual repression gets ugly and nightmarish in Anmol Sidhu’s IFFLA Los Angeles premiered debut feature Jaggi, which upends the Punjabi machismo stereotype, with its bold depiction of sodomy/male rape and the stigma in rural Punjab. Sparks of Punjabi realism has been seen in the films of directors including Gurvinder Singh (the backdrop of the ’80s Khalistani movement in Chauthi Koot, 2015) and Ivan Ayr (on truck drivers in Meel Patthar/Milestone, 2020), and the malaise of the chitta (drug) problem shown in the commercial Udta Punjab (2016), but rarely sexual repression or male sexual abuse. The spindly Jaggi, played compellingly by theatre actor Ramnish Chaudhary, a product of a dysfunctional family, he becomes the target of repeated sexual assault at the hands of his male school seniors. Here’s the psychological trauma of boys and young men who can’t protect themselves against sexual harassment. Even marriage isn’t an escape from this nightmare.

When: May 7, 9 pm, Stein Auditorium

Under the Waters

Good touch and bad touch is again in the news. What about the ambiguous touch? Ambiecka Pandit’s second short film is one of the best independent movies to have emerged last year. This is a sensuous telling of a brief queer tale, devoid of any woke grandstanding. With aural amplification (sounds of pounding hearts and bodies diving in water), minimal dialogues, and facial expressions, the Marathi film washes over the audience. Two families are vacationing by the seaside, the pubescent Sarang (Nishant Bhavsar) is being taught to swim by the older family friend/relative Mihir (Shivraj Waichal). The two share a playful camaraderie, and comfort with each other’s bodies until a sexual transgression under the waters. An episode that compels Sarang to retreat unto himself, unable to fathom how to process what transpired, Mihir appears cool and nonchalant, as if such encounters are quotidian. For Sarang, the encounter, and loss of innocence, part angers and part amuses him. He has no vocabulary to associate these changes in feeling, a new affection and forbidden impulse for this person, who has crossed a line of friendship. Sarang’s is an instantaneous transition from being a child to a young adult, with a newfound knowledge, perhaps, the nascent awakening of his sexual orientation. The scenes are charged, an unspoken knowing tension hangs in the air. Unable to clasp on to whether to acknowledge or admonish Mihir’s act, Sarang’s look swings between feral and deadpan when facing Mihir, who is older and physically stronger, desired by both the sexes. Mihir betrays pangs of guilt on his face only in these moments, when Sarang is around, like a secret code of unspoken communication between the two, whose backdrop is formed by the families’ chatter. Pandit dexterously crafts a world within a world, a parallel private world within the public.

When: May 14, 2 pm, Stein Auditorium

Ruminations on death

Meghdoot/The Cloud Messenger

Much before Rishab Shetty fused folk performative art and cinema in his national craze the Kannada film Kantara, independent filmmaker Rahat Mahajan deployed the visual grammar to write a teen, boarding-school romance. Mahajan, who’s previously worked as Vishal Bhardwaj’s director’s assistant (Kaminey, 2009; the un-realised docu-drama Julia), blends modern form of storytelling (cinema) with its ancient form — theatre (Koodiyattam by Kapila Venu, Kathakali exponents Peesappilly Rajeevan’s Dashananan and Sadanand Bhasi’s Hanuman, and Theyyam by KN Lakshmanan). The film, emanating from a personal near-death experience, has been 12 years in the making. This philosophical, spiritual, experiential story is about tragic young love, about hope and transformation. A 16-year-old Jaivardhana/JV (Ritvik Tyagi, with a compelling screen presence) is smitten by his new classmate, Tarini (Ahalya Shetty), but there are greater forces at play between them. The story begins centuries before the film does. The eponymous title evinces Kalidasa’s fifth-century Sanskrit epic poem. Jaivardhana and Tarini are entwined in an eternal curse — life after life, they shall meet to not meet. Mahajan’s atypical and unsuspecting young free-will-less hero JV is predestined to break a curse. The film swaps the gender roles of the Hindu myth of Savitri and Satyavan. Kerala’s performative arts brush shoulders with Aghoris, Naga sadhus and Hanuman — a cinematic commingling of the north’s and south’s cultures. It would be tragic not to experience it on the big screen.

When: May 13, 6 pm, Stein Auditorium

Read full review: Before Kantara came Meghdoot, Rahat Mahajan’s mythological tragic love story

Nauha

“Death is the only thing that makes living real” believes young director Pratham Khurana, whose diploma short film was among 16 student films in La Cinef section (formerly Cinéfondation), a parallel event at the Cannes Film Festival last year. The category that has previously seen Payal Kapadia’s Afternoon Clouds (2017), Ashmita Guha Neogi’s top prize-winning CatDog (2020), and this year will feature Yudhajit Basu’s Nehemich later this month. Nauha (Urdu for mourning/lamentation) is a chamber film, the story of caretaker Kishan (Azhar Khan) and his inconspicuous relationship with Babuji (Uday Chandra), whose family lives in faraway US. The bedridden septuagenarian’s lack of a name is of import. The generic address “babuji” establishes age and class. The realness of death, however, never dampens the unusual, childlike exchanges, over three days, between a cranky but mischievous oldie and his vexed, yet tender, caregiver. The story is inspired from Khurana’s own experience with his friend’s father, who he took care of when the latter was on a manual ventilator, which appears in the film. Set in Noida’s winter, though shot in Mumbai’s Mira Road during the pandemic, the essence of weather’s symbolism was what the Mumbai-based Delhi boy wanted to evoke in Nauha — winter and night signal death — an epiphany he had while watching Shoojit Sircar’s October (2018). The class divide, like death, gets treated with grace and gravitas.

When: May 6, 2 pm, Stein Auditorium

Lalanna’s Song

With Nakshatra Indrajith in the titular role in this short film, filmmaker Megha Ramaswamy spins yet another beguiling, bizarre tale of spaces women inhabit, operate, oppress and combust in and the remains of the day from the meteoric collision of the adult’s and child’s worlds. The bizarre/surreal and Megha Ramaswamy are often hand in glove. She has displayed a proclivity for the unorthodox. To push the boundaries of genres, formats and storytelling. To wrest the attention to the female experience, be it that of a child or an adult. In Lalanna’s Song, she adds the delectable pairing of Parvathy Thiruvothu (Qarib Qarib Single, 2017) and Rima Kallingal, they are sour and sultry, and share an inimitable chemistry. The heroines are anti-heroines here. Ramaswamy shows the cyclicality of an ingrained violence/oppression whose recipients are almost always children. Here’s a girl child endowed with unnatural powers — freaky child subgenre, if you may — that render her less than innocent, good, or obedient. She is precocious, all-knowing, speaks like an adult, and unsettles the confident adult women, teasing out their innate violent streaks. How unhealed adults, the adult world and its disbelief and victim-making crush a child/child’s desires.

When: May 6, 2 pm, Stein Auditorium

Read full review: Parvathy and Rima Kallingal's paranormal tryst in ‘Lalanna’s Song’

Lalanna's Song from Deaf Crocodile on Vimeo.

Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar

COVID’s financial impact has been on all institutions, not just the socio-political ones, and in his debut Hindi feature set in Darbhanga, Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar, director-writer-editor Parth Saurabh shows the crumbling of another institution: love and relationships. The film is a fresh take on tragic young love which doesn’t end with the killing of the eloped couple. This couple, Sumit (Abhinav Jha) and Priyanka (Tanaya Khan Jha), isn’t as much predestined as they are free-willed to suffer, here are no family rivalries, class or caste divides, as one has seen in plenty of ’80s Hindi and regional films but here are two adults who suffer because of a choice they made. The woman, of course, suffers far more than the good-for-nothing man, who’s just floating about, aimlessly, chilling with equally jobless friends. The woman is willing to be the mother-figure, to salvage him, but the provider father-figure she looks for in her man is absent.

When: May 6, 7 pm, Stein Auditorium

Also read: The rise of Darbhanga wave: Three filmmakers, stories of home and Bihari cinema

Read full review: Pandemic, pyaar, paisa: The crumbling of love & youth in ‘Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar’