India’s women directors make a mark at Toronto International Film Festival
TORONTO: Though the kerfuffle over Priyanka Chopra inserting insurgency into Sikkim may have dominated headlines, the 2017 version of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) was marked by the red carpet treatment given to young, emerging women directors from India.
Three of them made their presence felt at the 42nd edition of the festival: Paakhi Tyrewala, director of Pahuna: The Little Visitors, the film produced by Chopra and which set the stage for those unfortunate remarks, Rima Das with her observational Village Rockstars set in a remote Assamese hamlet, and Bornila Chatterjee’s The Hungry. “I met Rima and Paakhi the other day. I was super pumped to meet them. I said, ‘I cannot believe there’s three of us’. It’s quite cool,” Chatterjee said in an interview.
The Hungry was the only one that could be described as commercial in the sense of being a thriller of sorts. It may well take its place in the pantheon of the goriest films ever made in India.
The young director, who was born in Los Angeles and splits her time between Kolkata and New York, takes a lesser known William Shakespeare drama and places it in a corporate milieu, where a wedding arranged between the families of tycoons spirals into mayhem. As TIFF’s artistic director Cameron Bailey wryly observed, “Indian weddings can’t get any more dysfunctional than this.”
Marrying Shakespeare to the slasher sensibility came about in 2015, as Chatterjee and her producers entered a British competition to celebrate the 400th death anniversary of the Bard the following year. The filmmakers opted for Titus Andronicus, as Chatterjee explained, “Because of its relative obscurity, that’s one of the things that attracted us to do the story and once you read it, it’s thrilling, it’s crazy.”
The filmmakers chose to set the movie in a business environment “because we wanted to portray people that felt like they lived above the law, we wanted to do it in the upper echelons of Indian society, so when the violent bits happen, it’s that much more jarring”, she said.
In fact, she said the film shot in Uttar Pradesh and New Delhi - isn’t even as macabre as the original text.