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Retrospective

Pather Panchali

Satyajit Ray

Bengali

125

|

1955

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

Satyajit Ray

Bengali

135

|

1963

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.

Seemabaddha

Satyajit Ray

Bengali

148

|

1971

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

Satyajit Ray

Bengali

110

|

1956

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.

Charulata

Satyajit Ray

Bengali

119

|

1964

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.

Agantuk

Satyajit Ray

Bengali

120

|

1992

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.

Apur Sansar

Satyajit Ray

Bengali

106

|

1959

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.

Kapurush

Satyajit Ray

Bengali

74

|

1965

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.

Pratidwandi

Satyajit Ray

Bengali

110

|

1970

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.

Feauture Films

Manik Babur Megh (The Cloud and the Man)

Abhinandan Banerjee

Bengali

97

|

2022

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.

Our Home

Romi Meitei

Manipuri

86

|

2022

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.

Cheepatakadumpa

Devashish Makhija

Hindi

24

|

2021

Three small town friends, their reunion, a gorilla, a bull, the full moon, the kundalini, a tomato, and patriarchy-smashing mischief!

Witness

Deepak

Tamil

128

|

2022

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.

Pada

Kamal K M

Malayalam

126

|

2022

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!

Hariva Nadige Maiyella Kaalu B

Babu Eshwar Prasad

Kannada

91

|

2021

The film is a meditation on the act of walking through the lives of three principal characters: Kumar, a photojournalist disenchanted with his regular job, visits different places seeking new sources of inspiration; Neelu, a salesgirl in a shoe shop with a set routine, is only interested in watching people walk; and Amaresha, an elderly prisoner, alleviates his feelings of confinement by walking to imagined places within his cell. The camera follows the gaze of the characters, trained to different directions, in some cases the ground and in others the sky, experiencing how they relate to the world around them, the minute details they observe, and their sense of time and place. Moving between dream and reality, the film is an exploration of the inner and outer landscapes they encounter.

Crescent Night

Gurvinder Singh

Punjabi

107

|

2022

Based on Gurdial Singh’s eponymous Crescent Night, this is the third part in Gurvinder Singh’s trilogy about patriarchal, hierarchic life in rural Punjab – after Alms for the Blind Horse and The Fourth Direction.

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.

Once upon a time in Calcutta A

Aditya Vikram Sengupta

Bengali

129

|

2021

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.

Ek Jagah Apni

Ektara Collective

Hindi

90

|

2022

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.

The Quarrel

Sanal Kumar Sasidharan

Malayalam

94

|

2022

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.

Appan

Abdul Majeed

Malayalam

129

|

2022

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.

Njoonj and family had always suffered because of the rogue that Itty was. Once Itty tried
to get involved in an extra marital affair with a woman and her husband Kuryacko
caught him red handed and tried to kill Itty. Itty got paralyzed below the waist, and the
doctors informed that he wouldn’t live past a week and sent him home from the
hospital. Njoonj and family were now relieved. They started preparing for his funeral
and waited for his death.But not only did Itti not surrender to death, but also he began
to bring into the house many of the atrocities he was committing outside. This led to a
lot of internal conflicts within the household.

If You Dare Desire

Debalina Majumder

Bengali

56

|

2017

In a small village of West Bengal - Swapna and Shucheta - two young women in love with each other - took their own lives. No one from their families came to claim their dead bodies. They remain unclaimed...
What if they were not dead but alive today? What if they had decided otherwise? Like many other couples, Aparna-Kajlee from Bongaaon, Moyna-Bandana from Purulia... who had died for love but still live among us, for us. What if Swapna and Shucheta ran away and survived? How would their life be, how would their desires take shape?
‘If You Dare Desire…’, is a film of possibilities… within this hetero-patriarchal world, the women resist with their bodies, with their hearts, their love and desires. They live many lives. They die many deaths. Through this living and dying, they love. They resist and they dream and they create new families, new claimants... new spaces of living, loving.. In the daily struggles of a far-away village. In the dark glitters of a big city. And in the spaces in between.
‘If You Dare Desire…’, is a wish-fulfilling film. A hyper-reality of desire.A politics of hope, resistance through desire, through daily living.
Welcome to the many worlds of Swapna-Shucheta.
Dare to dream, and desire!

Cycle

Devashish Makhija

Multilingual

24

|

2021

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.

Gargi

Gautham Ramachandran

Tamil

137

|

2022

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.

Declaration

Mahesh Narayanan

Malayalam

107

|

2022

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.

Nine Hills One Valley

Haobam Paban Kumar

Manipuri

75

|

2020

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.

Student Films

Matsya (Pisces)

Mayank Patel

Nimadi

16

|

2022

Matsya attempts to tell a story of love, loss, the inevitable regret and eventually coming to terms with and accepting the reality of life –it’s better to have loved and lost, than not having loved in the first place. The story is symbolized by adopting inspirations from the Indian mythological tales, especially of the titular fish god, Matsya, and weaving into it, an amalgamation of Indian astrological signs and tribal culture of rural central India that speaks Nimadi – the film’s spoken language.
In a sparse but scenic land, with its geography and period unfounded and untouched, Meena, (inspired by Pisces), characterized by his surreal abode that mirrors his volatile, emotional and magical inner life, Bhumi (inspired by Taurus), a more pragmatic presence that will bring stability and peace of mind in his life.
Meena is left alone and devastated. In a furious bid to change the past to fix his present, against the advice of a mysterious man, Meena sets out on a dreamscape, as a result, the entire story of Meena and Bhumi unfolds in reverse, where cause follows consequence, and conflicts follow resolutions.

Aamad

Digvijay Andhorikar

Marathi

14

|

2021

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.

Ninaivugalil (In Memories)

Jayashankar Ramu

Multilingual

24

|

2022

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.

Anekantvad

Ikprabh Singh Kohli

Punjabi/Hindi

21

|

2021

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.

Anekantvad, as the word so means, is a film that tries to ascertain that truth is multifold and can be seen from multiple facets.

No Place Like Home

Shallone Peraira

English

19

|

2022

Set against the suppressed grief of our times, ‘No Place Like Home’ is a film about memory and belonging, composed of snapshots of my inner landscape as I reacquainted myself with the city and reconstructed my ideas of love and family in a time of crisis. The film is an audio-visual diary of my time during the Pandemic as I came to terms with my mother’s illness. When the lockdown was announced, I moved back home to Mumbai. As life slowly resumed and people attempted to return to their former selves, the city seemed estranged from its residents. I saw my struggle reflected in the world around me- to pick up the pieces in the wake of devastation brought on by an inexplicable illness. This film is an attempt to heal from this experience through remembrance rather than dissociation.

Aashaon Ke Paar (Beyond Hope)

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.

My Father Told Me

Sisira Anil CK

Malayalam

16

|

2022

Our fifteen minute fiction is about Nimisha a 27 year old who works in Kuwait as a nurse. Her family includes father, mother and a younger sister, a middle class family. Nimisha comes home for a 45 days of vacation where she plans to marry her boy friend secretly and take him to Kuwait using husband visa which her company provides. Nimisha father came to know about the relationship and says he doesn’t like him also asks her to rethink about it. Unexpectedly next day Nimisha’s father dies and that puts Nimisha in a very crucial point where she is stuck between choosing her partner or father. Then she starts searching for the truth and she couldn’t find the exact reason why her father has rejected his proposal. During her journey she starts doubting her partner for things.Nimisha ends up at register office and still gets confused and we end our movie there with her living with what her father told which is untold. The movie talks about how people live with the things which someone’s death left by. It’s a family drama where we speaks about the depth of relationships and the grief we live with after a persons death

Mhanje Mhanje Wagache Panje

Adheep Das

Marathi

10

|

2022

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.

Aalam

Deependra Kumar Yadav

Hindi

16

|

2021

A single man, now widowed, consumed by the daily affairs of his life, is trying to find some peace. The CAA-NRC riots have taken a toll on his entire life. From being a family of three, he is now the sole member left. The result has jilted him far beyond the fence from where coming back seems impossible. Belonging to a minority community, the trauma that he festers alongside tends to take him back to memories which now only haunts him. He is listless and trying to sell his house because it is situated in the riot-hit area and dominated by a different community. He works at a factory and tries to manage the sale of his house but as per the government diktat, the struggles don't seem to end for him. It’s a story about the world around him which looks fine and solid but underneath it’s empty, screeching and wailing.

The film explores the aftermath of communal riots and the struggle of an individual to
somehow survive when the world around him moves unaffected.

Jananam

Ajay KTV

Malayalam

19

|

2021

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.

Amma Lodge

Shivashis Pradhan

Odia

18

|

2022

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.

Ke Tohra Sang Jayi ( Who will go with you?)

Aniket Kumar

Hindi

11

|

2022

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.

Sadabahar

Suyash Kamat

Konkani/Hindi

13

|

2022

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.

Ubad Khabad

Avanti Basargekar

Hindi

10

|

2022

An illegal Bangladeshi immigrant, a young hawker who sells earrings in local trains, and an elderly Marathi woman get trapped in the debris created when a foot overbridge collapses on a railway track.
The Marathi woman remains unconscious whilst the Bangladeshi woman and the boy wake up to see their predicament. Rescue operations begin overhead, and the two reveal to each other their fear and dread of being rescued and resurfacing to the city. Whilst they are being rescued, the three characters spend both, just a few hours and many years in the enclosure. The stagnant enclosure which forms their home and the conversations they have reflect upon the kind of life they otherwise live in the city above, which continues thriving without them.

Shaer (Hair)

Sana Salim

English

4

|

2022

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.

Teere Bendho Na

Niranjan Kumar Kujur

Bengali

37

|

2021

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.

Detective Ammamma

Athul Kisha

Malayalam

30

|

2022

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.

Polatak (A Runway)

Gourav

Bengali

26

|

2021

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.

Special Focus

Nasir

Arun Karthick

Tamil

90

|

2020

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.

Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar

Parth Saurav

Hindi

105

|

2022

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.

Be Ches ne Veth ( I am not the river Jhelum)

Prabhash Chandra

Kashmiri

95

|

2022

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.

The Great Indian Kitchen

Jeo Baby

Malayalam

101

|

2021

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.

Amar Colony

Siddharth Chauhan

Hindi

77

|

2022

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.

Jhini Bini Chadariya (The Brittle Thread)

Ritesh Sharma

Multilingual

97

|

2021

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?

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