New Indian Cinema
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UGLY (Anurag Kashyap, 2013, India)
Director Anurag Kashyap really knows how to cast his films, finding actors (rather than working with stars) with the right level of anxiety in their faces, inculcating a strange volatility in the audience. Ugly could almost be a companion piece to Peddlers, a film produced by Kashyap and which is stuck in distribution hell with Continue reading
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HARUD / AUTUMN (2010, dir. Aamir Bashir, India)
Harud is singular in many ways when it comes to the representations of Kashmir in the sphere of Indian cinema. It does the impossible. It tells the story of Kashmir by simply telling the story of a family. Harud communicates elemental ideas about human relations thereby transcending the way political biases have in the past, Continue reading
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PLACEBO (Dir. Abhay Kumar, 2014, India)
Abhay Kumar’s feature length directorial debut Placebo, a fiercely inventive documentary, had its world premiere last month at the IDFA in Amsterdam. What makes the project especially significant from a funding point of view is the director raised much of the financing through ‘crowd funding’. A trailer released in February 2013 helped to attract attention Continue reading
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QISSA: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost (Dir. Anup Singh, 2014, India) [Spoilers]
The title of the film comes from the arabic word ‘Qissa’ which means folk tale. The Punjabi Qissa has a strong oral tradition and families from the Punjab can recite Qisse or tales that are both specific to genre and a family history. Anup Singh draws widely on such a cultural tradition, narrating a tragic Continue reading
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TITLI / BUTTERFLY (Dir. Kanu Behl, 2014, India) – Badlands [SPOILERS]
The construction site in which empty buildings, namely shopping plazas and apartments, that has reoccured throughout so many contemporary Indian indie films could arguably be a trope now. In Titli, it is the parking lot that acts as source of neo capitalist aspiration and means of flight from a vicious New Delhi underbelly. What is it Continue reading
Movie Mahal 