India has selected Laapataa Ladies (Lost Ladies) as its candidate for the Best International Feature Film category at the 97th Academy Awards.
Directed by Kiran Rao and produced by Jio Studios, the Hindi film is described as a light-hearted satire on patriarchy.
It follows two brides, whose identities are hidden by an elaborate bridal head covering, who get mixed up on the eve of their wedding days, setting them on the paths of very different destinies from those they had envisaged.Read More »
This a journey of a detective,his life and how things are to him. His life is about following people, finding though he is still in search for himself, how he connects to the people he meets and gets intertwined in their lives.Read More »
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Benegal’s successful feature debut is set in feudal AP and consolidated the New Indian Cinema movement. The politically inflected melodrama tells of a newly married urban youth, Surya (Nag, in his Hindi film debut), who is sent alone to his rural home to look after his ancestral property. Finding himself in the role of the traditional landlord, he has an affair with Lakshmi (Azmi, in her extremely powerful film debut), the young wife of a deaf- mute labourer (Meher), and she becomes pregnant. Her husband, believing the child to be his, goes to tell the landlord the good news but Surya, consumed by his guilt and afraid of being exposed, beats the man almost to death. Lakshmi then turns on her former lover with a passionate speech calling for a revolutionary overthrow of feudal rule. In the last shot, a young boy throws a stone at Surya’s house and then the screen turns red.Read More »
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Nandini has to choose between Sameer, the man who taught her to fall in love; and Vanraj, the man from whom she learnt how to abide and fulfill promises of love.Read More »
Essential Hindi popular cinema classic and a pioneer entry of the 1970’s Indian crime films. This is the breakthrough film of superstar Amitabh Bachchan, seen here in his “angry young man” persona for the first time. The people behind this was Salim-Javed, a screenwriting team who were responsible for bringing in a hardhitting socially-slanted style in Hindi cinema, penning such classics as Deewar, Sholay and Trishul.
The plot is a revenge story in the mould of the spaghetti western Death Rides a Horse, with Bachchan witnessing the murder of his parents as a child, and a chain on the murderer’s wrist acting as a flashback device…Read More »
Subhash Nagre runs a parallel government in the city where he has a cult following. When his enemies plot to murder him, his son takes charge and stands up against them.Read More »
Cultures and families clash in Mira Nair’s exuberant Monsoon Wedding, a mix of comedy and chaotic melodrama concerning the preparations for the arranged marriage of a modern upper-middle-class Indian family’s only daughter, Aditi. Of course there are hitches—Aditi has been having an affair with a married TV host; she’s never met her husband to be, who lives in Houston; the wedding has worsened her father’s hidden financial troubles; even the wedding planner has become a nervous wreck—as well as buried family secrets. But Nair’s celebration is ultimately joyful and cathartic: a love song to her home city of Delhi and her own Punjabi family.Read More »
