Cinemascope

 The English title for Anand Patwardhan’s searing and sprawling political documentary Vivek – made over 4 years, clocking a colossal 4 hour...

 Shaunak Sen’s gritty and hypnotic debut Cities of Sleep – filled with dystopian poetry and cutting irony – was a miniature act of marvel. ...

 The colour of revolution – against gender, caste and domestic violence – is hot pink in Nishtha Jain’s fierce documentary Gulabi Gang . The...

 British-Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri’s gripping, smouldering and impressive debut feature Santosh operated in the grim intersectionality ...

 While Govind Nihalani’s films were always political, rarely were they so unreservedly Marxist as his compelling and immensely underrated Ag...

 M.S. Sathyu’s celebrated film Garam Hava delved into the minority experience during India’s Partition, not in terms of physical violence a...

 Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s excellent tapestry Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyoon Aata Hai opened with an absorbing ride through the streets of Bombay, ...

 Made during the 1980s, his final productive decade, Mrinal Sen’s Khandhar was as much about physical ruins as emotional ones. The interpla...

 Mrinal Sen’s first Hindi film, Bhuvan Shome , came at an intriguing juncture. While he’d already made 8 features – including the delightful...

 Payal Kapadia’s stunning hybrid docu essay A Night of Knowing Nothing – alternately hypnotic and urgent, intimate and shared, impressionis...

  Kalyug , Shyam Benegal’s modern-day retelling of Mahabharat , mirrored the giant epic’s violent tale of familial feud, hubris, compromise...

 Shyam Benegal, who’d made ad films on Amul during his advertising days, partnered with Verghese Kurien – who’d played a pivotal role in Amu...

 Devashish Makhija boldly combined bleak social observations and scorching political inquiries with genre elements and narrative urgency – t...

  Monica, O My Darling is a heady, devilish and deliriously entertaining joyride, and riotously lurid and pulpy at that. This crackling cel...

 In his nuanced, compelling, politically urgent and deeply solemn reportage essay While We Watched , Vinay Shukla freely traversed from the ...

 Shaunak Sen, while speaking of the driving force behind his terrific documentary All That Breathes , articulated his eagerness to “touch up...

 The scarring memories of Partition – displacement of millions; the macabre violence, irreparable loss and profound rootlessness that accomp...

  Mandi , or physical marketplace, manifests market economy, interplay of demand and supply, and flow of capital; it’s a place, therefore, m...

 Serious and meaningful films on journalism in India are as rare and elusive as serious and meaningful journalism in India – which, of cours...

  Khabar Lahariya (literally, “News Waves”) is a rare beacon of hope for journalism in the country – in a landscape otherwise cluttered wit...