Political Cinema
-
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
-
SONG OF LAHORE (Dir. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, Andy Schocken, Pakistan/US, 2015)
The incandescent documentary Song of Lahore narrates a hopeful story about culture and the arts in Pakistan which has witnessed since the 1970s a steady decline and erosion of both. Directors Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Andy Schocken frame the recent emergence of Sachal Studios, set up to try and bring together some of Pakistan and Lahore’s best Continue reading
-
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
-
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
-
PAPILIO BUDDHA (Dir. Jayan Cherian, 2014, India)
So many voices go unheard in the media. The oppressed, the minorities, those fighting for their very existence are blotted out of history, expunged since they do not fit the dominant narrative being mythologised, one in which Gandhi’s Satyagraha is continually promoted as the egalitarian solution to most of the divisions that still exist in Continue reading
Movie Mahal 