It’s India’s year at 77th edition of Cannes Film Festival
- 09 May 2024
Saibal Chatterjee, award-winning film critic
India has never had it so good at the Cannes Film Festival. A record eight titles from and/or about the subcontinent will screen at the 77th edition of the festival scheduled from May 14 to 25. It isn’t, however, the unprecedented number alone that is historic.
Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) alumna Payal Kapadia’s first narrative feature, All We Imagine as Light, has broken a 30-year-long jinx by securing a slot in the festival’s Main Competition. The last Indian film to compete for the Palme d’Or – Shaji N. Karun’s Malayalam-language Swaham – made the cut in 1994. “India and China are important markets for films. They are making a strong comeback to Cannes,” the festival’s artistic director Thierry Fremaux said at the press conference in Paris to announce this year’s official selection. The selection of All We Imagine as Light, an Indo-French-Dutch co-production, comes in the wake of the best documentary prize (the Golden Eye) that Kapadia’s innovative and provocative A Night of Knowing Nothing, won in Cannes in 2021. In 2017, her short fiction film Afternoon Clouds was a part of Cinefondation, Cannes Film Festival’s competition for film schools.
This year, another short narrative film from FTII, Chidananda S. Naik’s Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know…, based on a Kannada folk tale reinterpreted for contemporary times, will vie for an award in the same section, now rechristened La Cinef. Mysore-based Naik traded a career in medicine for filmmaking. After passing out of medical college, he practised as a doctor for a few months before enrolling in a one-year course in the television wing of FTII. Sunflowers… was Naik’s final television film at the institute. Featuring actors from Karnataka, the 16-minute Kannada film was made with the help of young technicians trained at the Pune institute.
All We Imagine as Light, according to the film’s official synopsis, is about two Malayali nurses in Mumbai. One of them (played by Kani Kusruti) receives an unexpected gift from her estranged husband. Her younger roommate (Divya Prabha) struggles to find a private spot in the city to spend time with her boyfriend. The duo decides to go on a road trip to a beach town where, in a mythical forest, their dreams begin to manifest themselves. India is the theme of a pair of films in the Un Certain Regard section. One of them is British-Indian director Sandhya Suri’s fiction feature debut, Santosh. The film stars Shahana Goswami as a widowed woman who inherits her husband’s police job in the boondocks of north India and joins an investigation into the killing of a low-caste girl.
The Shameless, written and directed by Bulgarian filmmaker and visual artist Konstantin Bojanov, is the other film in the section this year with an Indian story. The cast of the film has Mita Vashisht and Tanmay Dhanania, besides Anasuya Sengupta and Omara Shetty.
Bojanov’s third fiction feature was in the making for well over a decade during which he travelled more than 10,000 kilometres across India. “The story of the film reveals our shared humanity,” says the director. “Culturally we are different but as human beings we are the same. We experience the same feelings of pain, love and desire.”
The parallel Directors’ Fortnight (Quinzaine des Cineastes) has selected Sister Midnight, Karan Kandhari’s Indo-British neo-noir drama starring Radhika Apte. The actor plays the role of a newly-married small-town woman who faces the disorienting realities of slum life in Mumbai and reacts to them with her own innate, untamed impulses.
In what is a particularly landmark year for FTII, Payal Kapadia’s batchmate Maisam Ali, a Ladakh native born in Iran, has also achieved a first by breaking into ACID Cannes with his debut feature In Retreat. ACID (Association for the Diffusion of Independent Cinema), a section that runs parallel to the festival, had never programmed an Indian film before. In Retreat is an austere meditation on the notion of home conducted through the minimalistic story of a man who returns to Leh after a long gap only to lose himself in a labyrinth of thoughts that prevent him from reconnecting with the place that he went away from many years ago.
“My relationship with home is ambiguous,” says Ali, who has collaborated on the film with technicians drawn only from FTII. “Home is where you find comfort but it is also a place where the imposition of boundaries begins.”
Of the eight films in the just-introduced Immersive Competition meant for XR (Extended Reality) projects, one, Maya: The Birth of a Superhero, a UK-US-France co-production, centres on the coming of age of South Asian women fighting off shame and fear in their quest for freedom.
Maya: The Birth of a Superhero is directed by Kolkata-born Poulomi Basu and C.J. Clarke and written by the two with British-Indian writer Manjeet Mann. The icing on the cake, a restored 4K version of Shyam Benegal’s Manthan (The Churning, 1976), written by the director with playwright Vijay Tendulkar and shot by Govind Nihalani, will play in the Cannes Classics section.
Manthan, which throws light on the pioneering milk cooperative movement spearheaded by Verghese Kurien, has been restored under the aegis of the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation GCMMF) by Film Heritage Foundation (FHF). Featuring Smita Patil, Girish Karnad, Naseeruddin Shah and Amrish Puri in key roles, the film was crowdfunded by 500,000 farmers and members of GCMMF. For FHF, headed by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, Manthan completes a remarkable hattrick. Aribam Syam Sharma’s Manipuri Ishanou and G. Aravindan’s Malayalam film Thampu were in Cannes Classics in 2022 and 2023 respectively.
The writer is an award-winning Indian film critic