Indie films big hit at Toronto film festival
TORONTO: The 2016 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) featured a bumper crop of Indian films, giving them a potent platform, but mainstream Bollywood couldn’t get any screen time.
Since Priyanka Chopra walked the red carpet for Mary Kom in 2014, the Mumbai masala factory has given way to another menu – from a choice of appetising documentaries to fulfilling features. And this appears to be a trend with North America’s most celebrated event of this nature. The nine films featured in 2016, a volume not seen in many years, fell well into the indie category.
The Indian documentary, in fact, was quite evident at TIFF. While it didn’t have a world premiere at the festival, The Cinema Travellers, directed by Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya, came with the cache of having won the special jury prize L'Oeil d'or: Le Prix du documentaire at Cannes.
It follows the mobile theatres of Maharashtra that once brought movies to rural areas, usually pitching their tents at religious fairs. But these cinemas are dying, even though “they are trying very hard (to survive) but not being very successful”, Abraham said.
TIFF programmer for documentaries Thom Powers described the film as “lyrical”. Madhesiya saw TIFF as an apt venue for such a film. “This is like a travelling cinema,” he said, pointing to the bustle around downtown Toronto during the 10-day festival, much like the crowds that gather for a mela.
Also on show was Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla’s An Insignificant Man, which tracks the formation of the Aam Aadmi Party by Arvind Kejriwal. The documentary ends shortly after Kejriwal first became chief ministerofDelhi. ForTIFF audiences, Kejriwal was pitched as “the Bernie Sanders of India.”
The filmmakers embedded themselves in the process before many took Kejriwal or his political aspirations seriously. Shukla said, “None of us had imagined it getting as big as it did. That’s where we started, we just started on a hunch that this may be interesting.” In that sense, this is a pioneering documentary.
If Bollywood was missing, one name from the industry, Konkona Sensharma, was present with her debut film as a director, A Death In The Gunj. A moving, often riveting ensemble drama with eerie atmospherics, this film will make its way to open the Mumbai Film Festival next month.
The movie is set in 1979 in the Anglo-Indian enclave of McCluskiegunj, in what is now Jharkhand, and Sensharma pointed out she would visit this town with her parents as a child and had returned now to use it as the setting for a fiction feature for the first time. She was surrounded by a clutch of veterans premiering their films. There were Deepa Mehta’s Anatomy Of Violence, based on the Nirabhaya episode, Malayalam maestro Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Pinneyum (Once Again), Bengali auteur Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Tope (The Bait), the Serbian-Indian production Dev Bhoomi (Land Of The Gods) with a celebrated director from that Balkan country, Goran Paskaljevic.