MEET THE DIRECTORS AT IFFB 2023
Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, was born in 1977 in Kerala, India. Originally a lawyer, Sanal formed a film society, called the Kazhcha Film Forum in 2001 for making independent movies through crowdfunding. His debut feature, Oraalppokkam (Six Feet High, 2014), won the Kerala State Film Award for Best Director, while his sophomore, Ozhivudivasathe Kali (An Off-Day Game, 2015), was awarded Best Feature Film at the same festival. His third film, Sexy Durga (2017) gained global attention and was the winner of the Hivos Tiger award at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam.
Born and brought up in Bihar, India, Prabhash Chandra is the artistic director of Alpana Theatre. He is a postgraduate from the Department of Physics and Astrophysics, University of Delhi. He has directed, adapted, and acted in numerous plays for over a decade now. Currently, he is a visiting faculty at the University of Delhi. He has directed a documentary, 'Mera Ram Kho Gaya' (2019) which received critical acclaim. I'm Not The River Jhelum (Be Ches Ne Veth) is his first feature fiction film.
Babu Eshwar Prasad trained as an artist, completing his graduation and post-graduation in painting and printmaking in the early 1990s, the latter from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Vadodara. A self-financed Kannada film, Wind Seed was selected for the NFDC Film Bazaar, Goa in 2014 in the rough cut stage and upon completion has been shown at Jio MAMI, Mumbai Film Festival, Bangalore International Film Festival, 3rd San Francisco South Asian Film Festival, Kunstsammlung (K21) Dusseldorf, and Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art.
Ritesh Sharma is a filmmaker who spent 13 years in theatre education and social activism. "The Holy Wives" about caste- based sexual exploitation and human trafficking in India has been screened in Australia, the UK, the USA, Europe and India. The film also won the prestigious Dadasaheb Phalke Film Festival Award in 2011. He has released 2 short films on tribal rights and domestic violence, and is now presenting his first feature film Jhini Bhini Chadariya, filmed in his hometown, Varanasi.
Kamal, a graduate of FTII, has worked as an associate director and writer with renowned filmmaker Santosh Sivan. His debut feature film ID, part of the Collective Phase One collaboration, won nine international awards and was screened at major film festivals. Kamal received India's Aravindan Award and the Gollapudi Srinivas National Award for Best Debut Director for ID. He served as Associate Professor at K.R. Narayanan National Institute of Visual Science and Arts (2014-2017). His second film, Pada, was released globally in March 2022.
Parth Saurabh was born and brought up in Darbhanga, the setting of Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar. After graduating from IIT Kanpur, he studied film direction at Whistling Woods International. While there, he was selected by Looking China and made a short documentary, The Ballad of Toyuk (2017), about the architecture and people of Xinjiang. His first feature screenplay, A Temple in the Village, was selected for the NFDC Screenwriters’ Lab 2017. He was part of the writing team on Achal Mishra’s critically acclaimed film Dhuin (2022), and Anubhav Sinha’s Bheed (2022).
Gurvinder SINGH (1973, India) worked as a graphic artist in advertising while studying at Delhi University. After that, he followed a postgraduate course in film directing at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune. For several years, he collaborated closely with filmmaker Mani Kaul. Before his feature debut, Alms for the Blind Horse (2011), Singh made several documentaries. The Fourth Direction (2015) was screened in the Un Certain Regard competition at Cannes. His film Bitter Chestnut (2019) premiered at the Mumbai Film Festival.
Romi Meitei is a prolific filmmaker who has given several box-office hits. Besides notching up commercial successes, his films have been screened in prestigious film festivals including IFFI, MIFF, IFFK, and others. He is a recipient of the prestigious FIPRESCI and NETPAC awards. He has also received several Manipur State Film Awards. He is also the Chairman of the Mami Thawan Foundation which aims to render services for the welfare of Manipur.
Siddharth Chauhan is a filmmaker based in Shimla/Mumbai. He has continuously taken his locally produced films for festivals in the UK, US, Sarajevo, Belarus, Indonesia, New Zealand, Italy, China, Canada, and France. The Government of Himachal Pradesh, India awarded Siddharth with a Financial Grant for making his next short film titled ‘The Flying Trunk’. Amar Colony is Siddharth’s debut feature film. His next film, 'Catch the Light' has been commissioned by the Kashish Arts Foundation.
FILM LINE UP FOR IFFB 2023
Polatak ( A Runway)
By Gourav
"A young factory worker works in an extremely noisy environment. The place where he lives is no different as it is by the railway tracks. Every day after a tiresome work his sleep gets hampered. Soon he realizes machines have started overpowering him. One day, he decides to run away, breaking out of the trap of machines, mundanity & noise."
Matsya (Pisces)
By Mayank Patel
Matsya tells a story of love, loss, regret, and acceptance, inspired by Indian mythology, particularly the fish god Matsya. Set in a timeless, rural landscape, the film follows Meena (Pisces), a dreamer trapped in emotional turmoil, and Bhumi (Taurus), her grounded counterpart who brings stability. After losing Bhumi, Meena embarks on a quest to change the past, with the story unfolding in reverse, where consequences follow causes and resolutions precede conflicts. The film blends Indian astrology and tribal culture, with a focus on the healing power of love.
My Father Told Me
By Sisira Anil CK
Our 15-minute film follows Nimisha, a 27-year-old nurse working in Kuwait, who returns home for a 45-day vacation with plans to secretly marry her boyfriend and bring him to Kuwait on a husband visa. Her father disapproves of the relationship and urges her to reconsider. The next day, her father unexpectedly dies, leaving Nimisha torn between her partner and her father's wishes. As she seeks answers, doubts about her partner arise. The film ends with Nimisha at the register office, uncertain, carrying the unspoken grief left by her father’s death. It's a family drama exploring relationships and the grief that lingers after a loss.
Ubad Khabad
By Avanti Basargekar
An illegal Bangladeshi immigrant, a young hawker, and an elderly Marathi woman get trapped under debris after a foot overbridge collapses. While the woman remains unconscious, the other two wake up to their predicament and share their fears of being rescued and facing the city above. As rescue operations unfold, the trio spends hours and years in the debris, reflecting on their lives in a city that thrives without them. The film explores their conversations and the contrast between their stagnant reality and the bustling world above.
Share (Hair)
By Sana Salim
How do you understand female intimacies? How often do you imagine the something or someone intimate to you by separating it from your personal baggages of memory? Sana Salim’s ‘Shaer’ asks us to rethink the way in which we form our perceptions about these intimacies and guides us to the complex entanglements behind the formation of such intimacies. This three minute short compels us to erase the flawed binaries of private/public and personal/political and calls for the politicisation of what we consider as private, intimate and therefore non-political.
Ninaivugalil (In Memories)
By Jayashankar Ramu
An exploration of memory, utilizing a hybrid of digital video and 35mm black-and-white film photographs, through the contrast in the old and new spaces and faces of Pune city. While relating to, and visualizing the people’s memories of the space, time, art, sound and objects around them in relation to the changing city.
Sadabahar
By Suyash Kamat
One night when they find themselves falsely accused of robbery, band members of Sadabahar, a wedding brass quartet from UP working in Goa, have to decide between pursuing a livelihood as ‘outsiders’ in Goa and returning to the lives they left behind in their villages
SadabaharMhanje Mhanje Wagache Panje
By Adheep Das
One night in a police station in Maharashtra, an old woman has come to complain about the tiger that has eaten her son. We spend one night with her as she travels through the many layers of police bureaucracy trying to get justice for her son.
Jananam
By Ajay KTV
Jananam is the story of a caterpillar who colours the life of seven year old Aadish and his grandmother visiting to nurse his pregnant mother. After a while, the caterpillar's life cycle reflects the lives of the characters.
Anekantvad
By Ikprabh Singh Kohli
A mother navigates her daughter through the abandoned crevices of her childhood home. Memories from her past eventually direct her to an incident from a riot-stricken Delhi of 1984; a critical time in the history of the Sikhs and her family, as sentiments ablaze and perspectives that were left unheard of are brought to light.
Aamad
By Digvijay Andhorikar
Yamini, a mother of 10 year old, who has been facing extreme domestic violence in her marriage, receives a letter from her mother. Frightened from this whole situation, Sanvi her daughter has now started understanding her mother's mental trauma. The letter brings an old memory of Yamini in which she finds a few minutes of happiness.
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Aashaon ke paar
By Rohit kumar
Hindi/23'/2020
A Migrant worker comes to a mega city with hope but soon gets disappointed. He starts to feel like he has been caught in a vertex specially when surrounded by the unattainable. His wife, a first time visitor to the city tries something to keep his hope alive.
Amma Lodge
By Shivashis Pradhan
After seven years, ABHISHEK, a reclusive young man raised in the city, decides to do his father's bone immersion. In his father's heart had remained a last, strange wish to find salvation in the river of his village. From Bhubaneswar, he travels to the village where there is an old inn called AMMA LODGE. While staying there, he meets three locals named Asraf, Raju and Balaram. He also meets a close friend of his father who tells him some of his father's untold stories.
Detective Ammamma
By Athul Kishan
A relatively peaceful small town, Kaavimukku, is in a state of panic when mysterious crimes start to happen. Nobody knows who is behind it. One strange night, Nandagopal’s dead grandmother appears as a detective to solve the crimes
Aamad
By Deependra Kumar Yadav
A widowed man, belonging to a minority community, struggles to find peace after the CAA-NRC riots devastate his life. Once part of a family, he is now alone, haunted by trauma and memories. Trying to sell his house in a riot-hit area, he faces ongoing struggles as government regulations complicate his efforts. The film explores the aftermath of communal riots, depicting the man's fight to survive in a world that seems unaffected on the surface but is empty and chaotic underneath..
Ke Tohra Sang Jayi
(Who will go with you?)
By Aniket Kumar
A 10-minute long take film, made under SRFTI coursework. The film revolves around a Dalit servant at the demise of his employer, who prophecies that the world on the other side of life is casteless and egalitarian. Performing the folk ritual, he feels the sense of atonement for the absence during his own mother's death.
No Place Like Home
By Shallone Peraira
No Place Like Home is an audio-visual diary reflecting on memory, belonging, and personal healing during the Pandemic. As I returned to Mumbai to care for my ill mother, the city, like myself, seemed estranged in the aftermath of lockdown and illness. The film explores my struggle to rebuild my ideas of love and family amidst crisis, using remembrance as a way to heal rather than dissociate. It’s a journey through grief, reflecting on the impact of an unprecedented time on both personal and collective levels.
Teere Bendho Na
By Niranjan Kumar Kujur
After his daughter, Urmi, is diagnosed with a heart complication in her school's annual health camp, Horipodo struggles to mend his ways with his wife who has already given up on him
Amar Colony
By Siddharth Chauhan
A crippled widow demands respect for her beloved pigeon. Caught in the maze of loneliness, a pregnant woman finds her
escape in a tomato. When paranoia strikes, a religious devotee of Lord Hanuman battles it with a mace
Appan
By Abdul Majeed
The story takes place in a hilly area in Kerala .At the top of a hill surrounded by rubber trees, Itty lives in a secluded house with his wife Kuttiyamma, son Njoonj, Njoonj’s wife Rosy and their 4 year old son Abel. Njoonj makes a living by tapping rubber and
cultivating other crops.
Be Ches ne Veth
( I am not the river Jhelum)
By Prabhash Chandra
The film shows glimpses of the life of it's young protagonist Afeefa living in Kashmir. On the other hand the film explores the suffocation and trauma experienced by Afeefa in her personal life and, on the other hand the film revokes the atmosphere of perpetual uncertainty and violence in the milieu. In following the life of Afifa the film traces her growing understanding of the forces at play in Kashmir.
Cheepatakadumpa
By Devashish Makhija
Three small town friends, their reunion, a gorilla, a bull, the full moon, the kundalini, a tomato, and patriarchy-smashing mischief
Crescent Night
By Gurvinder Singh
After 15 years in prison, for committing a murder to save his father’s honour, Modan returns to his village in Punjab. In his absence, the village’s power structure has shifted towards a landowner, to the detriment of his family. Worse still: his brother is the landowner’s lapdog
Cycle
By Devashish Makhija
A wronged young tribal woman, in the absence of systemic justice, turns rebel, but struggles to be able to fulfill all the expectations that the path to retribution demands
Declaration
By Mahesh Narayanan
Hareesh and Reshmi are an immigrant couple from the south of India working in a medical gloves manufacturing factory near Delhi. During the Covid-19 lockdowns, when an old video resurfaces among the workers of that factory, it opens up a pandora’s box that threatens Hareesh and Reshmi’s jobs, as well as their marriage. Finally, as desperation and hostility keep mounting, the two are forced to confront their own needs and desires while choosing between a life of conscience or one of compromise
Ek Jagah Apni
By Ektara Collective
Laila and Roshni are looking for a house after they are evicted from the place they rented. It soon becomes evident that their search for a home is also their ongoing search for a place in this society.
Gargi
By Gautham Ramachandran
The journey of a young school teacher to prove her father's innocence with the help of a juvenile advocate who's never even seen the interiors of a court hall
Hariva Nadige Maiyella Kaalu
(Running river is all Legs)
By Babu Eshwar Prasad
The film explores the act of walking through the lives of three characters: Kumar, a disillusioned photojournalist seeking inspiration; Neelu, a salesgirl who watches people walk; and Amaresha, an elderly prisoner who mentally walks to imagined places. The camera follows their gazes, capturing how they observe the world, blending dreams and reality to explore their inner and outer landscapes.
If you Dare Desire
By Debalina Majumder
If You Dare Desire... explores the story of Swapna and Shucheta, two women from West Bengal who took their lives in a world that rejected their love. What if they survived? The film imagines their lives beyond death, where their love, desires, and resistance shape new identities and families. Set between a rural village and a big city, it’s a journey of hope, resistance, and the power of love and desire in a hetero-patriarchal world. A story of dreaming, defying norms, and creating new spaces of belonging.
Nasir
By Arun Karthick
A middle-aged apparel shop worker lives a contented life in a crowded ghetto. Over the course of a single day, the man proves himself to be a champion of love and compassion amid local bigotry and division.
Nine Hills One Valley
By Haobam Paban Kumar
Anam Ahum, a Tangkhul from the hill, travels to Imphal city in the valley to meet his daughter before she leaves for New Delhi for further studies. During the course of the journey, he encounters different people and their stories, making us witness to the brutishness of ethnic conflicts. Yet, in the face of distressed memories, hope thrives.
Once Upon a Time in Calcutta
By Aditya Vikram Sengupta
A bereaved mother tries to desperately find a new identity, love and independence, but soon realizes that she is not the only scavenger in a city brimming with hunger.
Our Home
By Romi Meitei
Belonging to an isolated fishing community of the Loktak lake, Chaoren makes the best use of his exclusive existence by excelling in school. When the canoe he uses every day to attend school has to be sold off because of his father’s illness, his spirit is not dampened. He beats the long distance from his shanty floating hut to his school by swimming his way through. But when the Government issues an eviction notice demanding Chaoren’s family to leave their home, his dreams are left with an angst of a displaced person.
Pada
By Kamal K M
All the governments that have ruled the nation made laws that denied the indigenous people their way of life and their land often, protecting crony capitalist interests. The film revisits an episode of dissent in the 90s which brought up this question amongst us. A history forgotten!
Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar
By Parth Saurav
Amidst the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic, Sumit and Priyanka, an eloped couple, return to the security of their hometown. While Priyanka feels uneasy in the suffocating familiarity of her town, Sumit immerses himself in his tribe of friends.
Quarrel
By Sanal Kumar sasidharan
On the day he agreed to appear in court to sign a mutual divorce, Siddharthan, who is also a lawyer, cheated on his wife Lakshmi and went on an inland drive. He urges Lakshmi over the phone to postpone the divorce, citing their daughter Tara's future, but the attempt fails. On the
Way back, he met Sathi and her dumb daughter, who was leaving home Due to marital problems. That meeting changes his outlook on life."
The Brittle Thread
(Jhini Bini Chadariya)
By Ritesh Sharma
"Headstrong, feisty street dancer Rani works hard to take care of her daughter while reclusive weaver Shahdab discovers a new world in his friendship with an Israeli tourist. Exploring the love and hate dimensions in the
Ancient city of Varanasi, their cultural and political identities come to the fore. Will the luminous fabric of our diversity soon turn into an iron curtain, dividing those who seem to
belong & those who don’t?
The Cloud and the Man (Manik Babur Megh)
Abhinandan Banerjee
In artful and contemplative black and white, The Cloud and the Man (Manikbabur Megh) is a surreal and philosophical reflection on one recently-bereaved middle aged man and his accidentally complex yet meaningful relationship with a cloud.
The Great Indian Kitchen
By Jeo Baby
Like any Indian girl, the lovely, demure bride of the 'The Great Indian Kitchen' moves into her new husband's house prepared to adapt to their customs and make it her home. Everything seems to be going fine, her husband and his parents love and care for her. But unexpected problems arise when her kind mother-in-law has to be away. She struggles to cope with the mountain of seemingly endless household chores, differences in opinion and unfamiliar traditions.
Witness
By Deepak
The plot revolves around a mother, a sanitation worker, whose son dies while cleaning sewers in an apartment society. Convinced that her son was forced to do the job, the mother garners the help of a union worker, a lawyer and a resident of the apartment where the incident took place in her quest for justice.
PATHER PANCHALI
BY SATYAJIT RAY
Apu and his sister Durga try to make the most out of their poverty-stricken lives. Soon, when their father goes to the city for a job and their mother becomes increasingly bitter, things go downhill.
With the release of Satyajit Ray’s debut, an eloquent, important new cinematic voice made itself heard all over the world. A depiction of rural Bengali life in a style inspired by Italian neorealism, this naturalistic but poetic evocation follows a number of years in the life of an Indian family.
MAHANAGAR
BY SATYAJIT RAY
The Big City (Mahanagar), set in mid-1950s Calcutta and directed by the great Satyajit Ray, follows the personal triumphs and frustrations of Arati (Madhabi Mukherjee), who decides, despite the initial protests of her bank-clerk husband, to take a job to help support their family.
PRATIDWANDI
BY SATYAJIT RAY
A young man, newly graduated from college is unable to find meaningful employment. Family frictions and his continuing unsuccessful quest for a job place an unbearable strain on him causing him to hallucinate.
APUR SANSAR
BY SATYAJIT RAY
By the time Apur Sansar was released, Satyajit Ray was well on his way to becoming a legend, and this extraordinary final chapter of The Apu Trilogy brings our protagonist’s journey full circle, with Apu now in his early twenties, out of college, and hoping to live as a writer.
CHARULATA
BY SATYAJIT RAY
While her husband runs his newspaper, Charulata spends time reading, relaxing and spying on passers-by through her field glasses. But the arrival of her husband’s cousin sends ripples of adulterous desire through her pinned-butterfly existence, and sets her towards an artistic awakening as a writer.
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SEEMABADDHA
BY SATYAJIT RAY
An ambitious young sales manager engineers a company strike to cover up a technical flaw in their lamp equipment and ironically rises to a directorship, but loses the respect of his wife’s sister to whom he is attracted.
APARAJITO
BY SATYAJIT RAY
Ray had not planned to make a sequel to Pather Panchali, but after the film’s international success, he decided to continue the narrative, with Apu and his family having moved away from the country to live in the bustling holy city of Benares, where we witness Apu’s academic and moral education.
AGANTUK
BY SATYAJIT RAY
A well-off family is paid an unexpected visit by a man claiming to be the matriarch’s long-lost uncle. The initial suspicion with which they greet the man slowly dissolves as he regales them with stories of his travels, tales at odds with their conventional middle-class perspective of the world..
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KAPURUSH
BY SATYAJIT RAY
Amitabh, a scriptwriter of commercial films, drives in the country, scouting for locations. When his vehicle breaks down, he is taken in by a tea planter whose wife is Karuna, a woman whom he had formerly loved but whom he was unable or unwilling to take care of.
