Indian Cinema
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BHUVAN SHOME (Dir. Mrinal Sen, 1969, India) – ‘Big Bad Bureaucrat Reformed by Rustic Belle’
I’ve only really started to look at Bhuvan Shome so here are some tentative thoughts about the film, which I hope to return to at a later date. Bhuvan Shome is often cited as having initiated the New Indian Cinema movement. Released in 1969, along with Sara Akash and Uski Roti, as a triptych, the films Continue reading
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THE THRESHOLD (Dir. Pushan Kripalani, 2015, India)
Pushan Kripalani’s superbly acted two-hander Chekhovian chamber piece resonates expressively with the barest of cinematic narrations; a married couple in their sixties have reached a crossroads that results in Rinku (Neena Gupta) telling her husband Raj (Rajit Kapoor) that she is leaving him. Kripalani attentively details the regrets and hostilities laid bare in the candid Continue reading
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ISLAND CITY (Dir. Ruchika Oberoi, 2015, India)
The worker as drone is a familiar enough image these days, ubiquitous with the way corporate companies suffocate the life out of its employees so that they can maximise profits. The worker drone, dispossessed of all pleasure, is drolly captured in Ruchika Oberoi’s portmanteau Island City. The first story eponymously titled ‘The Fun Committee’ is Continue reading
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KOTHANODI / The River of Fables (Dir. Bhaskar Hazarika, Assamese, 2015)
A sour fruit that is really an unborn child, a young girl’s marriage to a python, a stepmother coerced by a demon are some of the folk tales or popular fables that form a major part of this impressive supernatural, horror compendium, the debut feature film of Bhaskar Hazarika. You could just as easily label Continue reading
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AN OFF-DAY GAME (Dir. Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, 2015, India: Malayalam)
Director Sasidharan’s experimental, anthropological dispositif takes a group of friends, lets them drink, throws them into the jungle, and then steps back with his camera, adopting tableau to frame their cruel, animalistic and casteist behaviour. The effect is unnerving to say the least, made altogether confrontational with the presence of a lower caste woman who Continue reading
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