Jio MAMI 2023: 24 must-watch indies at Mumbai Film Festival’s Recap from the last 3 years

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Borderlands (Rajasthani, Bengali, Nepali, Manipuri, Hindi)

Documentary; Dir: Samarth Mahajan

Meet a Pakistani Hindu refugee in Rajasthan, a housewife in Dinanagar in Punjab, a Bangladeshi married to an Indian who can only meet her parental family across the barbed fence at the annual Milan Mela bazaar on poila boishakh/Bengali New Year, an interceptor in Birgunj stops Nepali girls from crossing over and being trafficked, and a Manipuri filmmaker trying not to forget Manipur’s ‘complicated’ history and relationship with mainland India.

Adh Chanani Raat / Crescent Moon (Punjabi)

Feature; Dir: Gurvinder Singh

From the contemporary (angst of the marginalised lower caste) to the historical (paranoia in the backdrop of the ’80s militant unrest), the Punjabi life and society is the raison d’etre of Gurvinder’s cinema. The 2022 IFFR-premiered Adh Chanani Raat, Gurvinder’s latest film, based on Gurdial Singh’s 1976 eponymous novel, featuring Jatinder Mauhar, Samuel John and Mauli Singh, traces the difficulties faced by a recently released convict in starting a new life. This is the third film in Gurvinder’s home and homecoming trilogy. Very few filmmakers capture the violence of silence, with poetic intensity and gravitas, like him.

Dug Dug (Hindi)

Feature; Dir: Ritwik Pareek

Heard of Jodhpur’s Bullet Baba or Om Banna temple? The one-of-a-kind temple’s deity is a Royal Enfield Bullet bike. Every time the police would lock it up, it would reappear at the spot. Pareek paints the Rajasthani highways with psychedelic lights and beats to show blurring lines between reason and blind faith. It’s about thoughts shaping reality, you imagine something and then it happens, says Pareek about his 2021 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)-premiered film. Altaf Khan as the short-lived Thakur Sa has quite a screen presence.

Dostojee (Bengali)

Feature; Dir: Prasun Chatterjee

The Cinemascope lens of Chatterjee’s debut feature shows verdant expanse of blue skies, green paddy fields, white kaashphool along river Padma that run along India’s border dividing the two Bengal. The film, set in Domkal (Murshidabad), juxtaposes a politically-rife early ’90s Bengal — touched by the communal violence that followed the Babri Masjid demolition (December 6, 1992) and the ’92 Bombay blasts — with the innocence and purity of two thick-as-thieves happy-go-lucky eight-year-old friends Palash (Asik Sheikh) and Safikul (Arif Sheikh).

ALSO READ: Of Bengal, Babri and Boyhood in ‘Dostojee’

Dhuin (Maithili, Hindi)

Short feature; Dir: Achal Mishra

The second film of the Gamak Ghar filmmaker proves that he isn’t a one-hit wonder. In Dhuin, protagonist Pankaj (Abhinav Jha) dreams of leaving his small-town Darbhanga, where he does street theatre, for Mumbai to become an actor. But if he’s torn between his dream and duty on one hand, his father is old and out of job during the lockdown, his alienation among his filmmaker friends, who are exposed to world cinema and auteurs, is heightened by escalating sound of flies and a circumambulating learner’s car in the backdrop. Pankaj’s gentle despair make up Dhuin, which takes inspiration from early Hou Hsiao-hsien, The Boys from Fengkuei (1983).

ALSO READ: The rise of Darbhanga wave: Three filmmakers, stories of home and Bihari cinema

Fire in the Mountains (Hindi)

Feature; Dir: Ajitpal Singh

To Ajitpal Singh’s feat is to have created three stories in three formats and released them in the same year. He followed this 2021 Sundance Film Festival-premiered debut feature film with the short film, a childhood tale, Rammat Gammat (on YouTube) and the very popular Pavan Malhotra and Supriya Pathak-starrer web-series Tabbar (SonyLIV). This feature peels the layers of the romanticised picturesque-ness of the hill stations that popular culture has fed us with and shows us the barebones, it revisits a true story from Singh’s life to tell a universal tale of the hill people and the hard climb of their routine lives, the double whammy of tourism, and the intensity of blind faith that no contact with the outside world can abate.

ALSO READ: Ajitpal Singh’s Fire in the Mountains is a near perfect study of life as it ‘actually’ is in the hills

Invisible Demons (English, Hindi)

Documentary; Dir: Rahul Jain

After his spectacularly shot, critically-acclaimed documentary Machines, in his sophomore, Rahul Jain cuts through the toxic, smog-laced air and foamy Yamuna to film Delhi pollution. It played in Cannes Film Festival’s inaugural Cinema for the Climate segment in 2021.

Nine Hills One Valley (Manipuri, Tangkhul)

Feature; Dir: Haobam Paban Kumar

Manipur is still burning, for more than 170 days, following the Meitei-Kuki violence, while the national media attention may have shifted from this Indian state to the war in the West Bank, National Award winner Haobam Paban Kumar’s 2021 Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival Indonesia-premiered bilingual film literally travels — with a father going to Imphal — through the Northeastern valley gauging the tensions between the tribes and the cruelty of ethnic conflict.

A Night of Knowing Nothing (Hindi)

Documentary; Dir: Payal Kapadia

In FTII alumna Payal Kapadia’s hybrid documentary, winner of Amplify Voice Award at TIFF and L’Oeil d’or (Golden Eye) Best Documentary at Cannes Film Festival 2021, trains its lens on to her alma mater, Pune’s Film and Television Institute of India, staging a dance, a jugalbandi of youthful idealism with nightmarish socio-political reality (caste discrimination, communalism, crushing of freedom of speech/expression, censorship on political dissent and arrest of dissenters, skewed notion of nationalism) and at the centre of it are two students, lovers, who communicate through letters.

Meel Patthar / Milestone (Hindi, Punjabi)

Feature; Dir: Ivan Ayr

Now that Surinder Vicky — who left an indelible mark with Gurvinder singh’s Chauthi Koot (2015) — has become a household name with Kohhra, watch him, if you haven’t already, in Soni director’s 2020 Venice-premiered lyrical sophomore as Ghalib, a stoic and empathetic highway truck driver, with his young accomplice Pash (Lakshvir Saran), delineating the transactional relationship between the haves and have-nots, vehicle owners and drivers, and more.

Nasir (Tamil)

Feature; Dir: Arun Karthick

Premiered at 2020 IFFR Tiger Competition and won the NETPAC Award for Best Asian Film, Arun Karthick’s Tamil sophomore is based on the short story The Story Of A Clerk By Dilip Kumar. The film documents, in surveillance-camera-shots-like, vignettes from a day in the life of an Everyman garment-shop salesman Nasir. Public persecution of minorities upends the life of this man, and through his story, the film tells the story of a society, and a nation, as the line between the personal and the political blurs.

Once Upon A Time in Calcutta (Bengali)

Feature; Dir: Aditya Vikram Sengupta

The third film of the Asha Jaoar Majhe/Labour of Love director the Venice Film Fetsival-premiered OUATIC opens with Ela’s (played by Sreelekha Mitra) daughter’s death. With the only life in her dead marriage gone, Ela wants to move on. Her half-brother Bubu da (played by actor-politician Bratya Basu) — a nobody who needs nobody, a dinosaur in the ecosystem — refuses to budge out of the relic (mother’s memory, father’s cabaret theatre). Ela is a signifier of a modern, capitalist city in transition (a dinosaur statue gives way to a flyover, traditional Rabindrasangeet to its remix), a gestalt of aspirations and miscalculations.

Paka / River of Blood (Malayalam)

Feature; Dir: Nithin Lukose

There’s a saying in Malayalam that translates to “kill and dump the body in the river/trenches”. In his debut feature, Nithin Lukose (sound designer on Raam Reddy’s Thithi, 2015 and Dibakar Banerjee’s Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar, 2021) takes this saying and the stories of Kallody’s past (his village in Wayanad), and stews them in a river, which swells with cadavers. At Paka’s centre is a river and a retriever — Viking-like elderly Jose, whose stroking his white mutton chops signals a masculine world order. The gripping film doesn’t have Jallikattu’s high-octane thrill, Paka, featuring Basil Paulose and Vinitha Koshy as star-crossed lovers from two warring families, scores on restrained display and eerie composition.

Pedro (Kannada)

Feature; Dir: Natesh Hegde

Produced by Rishab Shetty Films, Natesh Hegde’s 2021 Busan International Film Festival-premiered critically acclaimed Kannada film dropped by the Bengaluru International Film Festival 2022 for reasons unknown, is the story of an ordinary man and his extraordinary circumstances in a lush, rain-soaked Karnataka village, where one miscalculated act costs him everything; he is only representative of the fate of the kind of those who can never escape the trappings of an oppressive system. Hegde’s father Gopal Hegde plays the titular role with a lot of heart and pathos.

The Rapist (Hindi)

Feature; Dir: Aparna Sen

It stars Konkona Sensharma. That’s enough reason to watch the film. The veteran filmmaker Aparna Sen’s directorial also features the emerging acting powerhouse Tanmay Dhanania. There’s Arjun Rampal if that’s of interest to you. And the film won the prestigious Kim Jiseok Award at the 2021 Busan International Film Festival. The social drama gets psychological as a middle-class academic wants her rapist — who’s sentenced to death — to tell her why he committed the crime.

Shoebox (Bengali, Hindi)

Feature; Dir: Faraz Ali

Set in a spatiotemporal reality when the city of Allahabad was becoming Prayagraj, Ali’s Shoebox is a gentle elegy for his city, before the old world gave way to the new. It also harks back to the early 2000s which sounded the death knell for single-screen theatres, as the country’s development demanded malls. Commerce over art. Sentimentality, nostalgia, melancholia, a holding on to a past, to a way of life, to a single-screen cinema theatre, to a daughter’s memories of a father, as new forces bulldoze the physicality of a city, one stuck in a flux of its own internal violence. But can memories be erased, or are they sealed in a shoebox and thrown on the back-burner? Can violence — the weapon that the morally weak resorts to — ever avenge one’s loss or help one heal? Amrita Bagchi plays the daughter, in a probashi Bengali family of Allahabad, with a lot of heart, reticence and gravitas.

Tortoise Under the Earth / Dharti Latar Re Horo (Santhali)

Docu-fiction; Dir: Shishir Jha

Jha’s film, with a phlegmatic pace, listens in to the Santhals of Turamdih uranium mines in Talsa village, in Jharkhand. “The power of the unknown” drew him. When he went to Turamdih, he saw entire families cycling for 25-30 km to earn Rs 60-70, on low-light highways, “I didn’t know how to keep those visuals in my story,” he says. So, he didn’t. He didn’t want to dramatise the story, instead let the locals sing of their sadness as well as their joys. Equipped with basic research with the books of PO Bodding and stories by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar — gripped by Shekhar’s evocative prose, magic realism and kadambi trees — and the folk tale of Earth’s creation story became his entry point into the larger tribal story.

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WOMB: Women of My Billion (Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu)

Documentary; Dir: Ajitesh Sharma

Ajitesh Sharma’s W.O.M.B. births a unique movement on celluloid. After Delhi Crime, Sharma and Apoorva Bakshi unite in this 2022 documentary recording Srishti Bakshi’s CrossBow Miles movement, a Kanyakumari to Srinagar walk, listening in to stories of gender-based violence across the length and breadth of India. The trigger for her long walk was the news of the 2016 highway-91 (Delhi-Kanpur) mother-daughter gang rape case in Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh, kilometres away from her Delhi home, and the fatigue among her friends and cousins to talk about rapes in India. Household conversation about safety, women empowerment and gender parity is still a far cry in the country.

Meghdoot / The Cloud Messenger (English)

Feature; Dir: Rahat Mahajan

A 16-year-old Jaivardhana/JV (Ritvik Tyagi) 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. Much before Rishab Shetty fused folk performative art and cinema, Mahajan, who competed for the prestigious Tiger Award at 2022 IFFR, deployed the visual grammar to write a teen romance. If Kantara draws on Tulu Nadu’s folk ritual of Bhoota Kola, Mahajan blends modern form of storytelling (cinema) with its ancient form — theatre (Koodiyattam, Kathakali, Theyyam). Mahajan assisted Vishal Bhardwaj on Kaminey (2009).

ALSO READ: Before Kantara came Meghdoot, Rahat Mahajan’s mythological tragic love story

Goldfish (English)

Feature; Dir: Pushan Kripalani

Kripalani’s sophomore, the 2022 Busan International Film Festival-premiered Deepti Naval and Kalki Koechlin-starrer, also featuring Rajit Kapur, Bharti Patel, Gordon Warnecke, is set in London, where the biracial Anamika/Ana (Koechlin) is an estranged daughter who prefers to go by her British name Ana Fields, distancing herself from her Indian genes — and Indian mother, Sadhana (Naval). Their relationship is fraught, and yet the bitterness isn’t overstated. It ebbs and flows.

ALSO READ: In Goldfish, Deepti Naval and Kalki Koechlin's relationship with dementia hits home

Hridoy Bosot/ A Home for My Heart (Bengali)

Documentary; Dir: Sankhajit Biswas

Trans person Sudeb Suvana undergoes Gender Affirmative Surgery in the duration of this intimate film that captures the multihued mental and emotional tsunami she finds herself in on her journey to becoming a real woman, to give her soul the body that it seeks, to give her heart the home that it needs. This decision but naturally stirs up the storm in a cup, her family’s dismay, who fear societal backlash. Love, however, remains elusive, and she realises that the surgery hasn’t changed her destiny as a transgender, as she had hoped it would, as she’d saved every penny, swallowed every hurt for it. She has to reconcile with her reality anew.

Vazhakk / The Quarrel (Malayalam)

Feature; Dir: Sanal Kumar Sasidharan

Like all of Sanal's films, 2022 International Film Festival of Kerala-premiered Vazhakk, too, feels like a psychological trip, reflections of his own life. Siddharthan (Tovino Thomas) drives away into the wilderness, running away from having to make a decision. In the jungle, he meets a feeble Sathi (Kani Kusruti), whose own marital discord shows to him an upended image of his own. With its characters, lost, floundering, grappling in a jungle-like maze of life, set to an immersive cinematography and beguiling background music, Vazhakk makes for a gripping watch.

ALSO READ: Sanal Kumar Sasidharan: ‘My films have changed me, they are messages to myself, to purify myself’

Koli Taal / Chicken Curry (Kannada)

Feature; Dir: Abhilash Shetty

Set in a Karnataka village, an elderly couple, who live in a small farm, technology less, await the arrival of their grandson, who hasn’t visited in three years. The news of his homecoming infuses new rigour into their dull lives, as the two go about getting a rooster to prepare his favourite chicken curry. And then, someone steals the rooster. The film is a sweet tale of simple emotions.