India

A nightmare creature haunts a young girls dreams. Her friends refuse to believe her when she tells them that the fiend has entered the real world and they are all to die a horrible death. Soon her fears start to come true.Read More »

Feature film version of Mani Kaul’s film on Dostoevski’s masterpiece that was shown at NYFF.

Synopsis:
Mani Kaul’s adaptation of Dostoevski’s Idiot is his most profoundly affecting film and a “tour de force” (Rajadhyaksha) that co-ordinates actors, settings and situations to a multiplicity. It his most realized attempt at making formalist film by moving the camera,without looking through the viewfinder to make Gilles Deleuze’s reading of cinema as an any-instant-whatever or equidistant instant to an any-space-whatever or any equispatial instant. This equispatial instant is created by destroying the dialectic between required and not-required, sacral and profane. Mani Kaul, analyzing his own films would state that, whereas his earlier works engaged a rarefaction of information, Idiot was the first to encounter a saturation of events.Read More »

Synopsis-
Nothing is common between the two men to ever meet and understand each other; neither the origin of the British administration of imperial time nor the primitive culture of the tribal from the jungle in central India. Nothing is common but the sharing of a common passion: hunting.

To both of them a big game is a game, a prey is a prey; this is probably why Ghinua, the young hunter and a loving husband, reacts like a terrible “hunter” when the usurer-landlord steals his wife. He slays him as the wild pigs have to be slain when they destroy harvest, or a tiger when he lifts a child. An avenged man, he brings his trophy, the head of the most mischievous game in his area, to the only man who will understand him, the English sahib, the other hunter.Read More »

AMMORU

A groundbreaking special effects extravaganza from South India–or Tollywood (Telugu film industry)–and an all-around mind-roaster. Completed in 1995, the film was widely lauded for its “up to the minute technical expertise.” Obviously that’s no longer the case, but AMMORU still excels as lightning paced, thrill-a-minute insanity.Read More »

After his father’s disappearance, eight-year-old Dighu seeks refuge from loneliness in his imagination and diary entries.Read More »

Synopsis:
Ranjit is a young man who has been assured a lucrative job in an Indo-British firm by a family friend. All he has to do is turn up for the interview dressed in a western-style suit. As luck would have it, all city laundries are on strike that morning, and his only suit is dirty. The film is a frantic search for a new suit to be borrowed from any of his friends, to make it in time for the interview.Read More »

Wikipedia wrote:
It is based on the short story “In the Ravine” by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. The movie is an important work in the Indian Parallel Cinema movement which started in the early 1970s. It is one of the last films to be part of the movement as it died out by the early 1990s.

Quote:
Maniram lives in a town and is a crooked businessman. The elder son is jailed for counterfeit currency. The younger son is a mad simpleton and married, but his wife loves another guy. She goes in business with land wrestled from Maniram.Read More »

Quote:
Rudaali is a 1993 Hindi film directed by Indian director Kalpana Lajmi, based on the short story written by famous Bengali litterateur Mahasweta Devi. The film was selected as the Indian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 66th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee.

The film is set in a small village in Rajasthan, India. It tells the story of a woman named Shanichari, who was abandoned by her mother shortly after her father’s death. Bad fortune follows her throughout her life.Read More »

Synopsis:
The film interprets a story from the Uttara Kanda of the epic poem Ramayana, where Rama sends his wife, Sita, to the jungle to satisfy his subjects. Sita is never actually seen in the film, but her virtual presence is compellingly evoked in the moods of the forest and the elements. The film retells the epic from a feminist perspective, and is about the tragedy of power and the sacrifices that adherence to dharma demands, including abandoning a chaste wife.Read More »