Highlighting South Asian films/directors at Toronto International Film Festival

 

Dhobi Ghat - Mumbai Diaries
Year: 2009
Language: English, Hindi
Producer: Aamir Khan, Kiran Rao

The rains in Mumbai are a beautiful curse. Sheets of water fall over the city, drenching and cleansing and casting vast millions in the same grey, glistening hue. Kiran Rao sets her impressive debut feature during Mumbai's monsoon season, using the sound and visuals of the rains to bridge the divides between her characters. This is a love letter to her city, most of all to the work and art that drives Mumbai, rain or shine.

Indian superstar Aamir Khan plays Arun, a brooding painter introduced at a gallery launch of his work. Uninterested in small talk, he strikes up a flirtation with Shai, an Indian American woman visiting her family in the city. The next morning, awkwardness descends and he practically shoves her out the door. But, in the way of the Maximum City, Shai and Arun find themselves inextricably linked. They share a laundry man, a dhobi, who picks up and delivers their clothes. One of the millions of workers who keep Mumbai humming, Zohaib maintains a friendly but formal relationship with Arun. Shai, however, becomes fascinated with Zohaib and wants to follow him to the dhobi ghat, the city's sprawling laundry district, where she hopes to indulge her photography hobby by capturing him at work.

Informed by Wong Kar-wai and Tsai Ming Liang, but directing with her own intimate sensibility, Rao draws her three characters together against the backdrop of a city that gives and takes in equal measure. It took years for American independent cinema to develop its own narrative voices in contrast to Hollywood storytelling. In India, the emergence of a contemporary indie style is happening right now. Dhobi Ghat marks a major step forward for Indian filmmaking. It's exciting that Aamir Khan and Kiran Rao are taking that step together.

 

 

Country: India

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As India’s independent film movement surges, Anurag Kashyap is at the forefront of the action. His Dev D.  stripped away Bollywood’s commercial sheen to reveal a generation of urban Indians as they are today: ambitious, exciting and international. That Girl in Yellow Boots  takes a hard look at those South Asians who live in between worlds. A portrait of a biracial woman trying to find her place in Bombay, it is exactly the brand of urgent, passionate filmmaking that is transforming how we think about Indian cinema.

Ruth has spent enough time in India to know how to work the system, including how to manipulate the sleazy bureaucrat at the immigration office. With her visa extended, she returns to “studying massage,” which is really a soul-squandering job servicing men at a backroom parlour. Her boyfriend, Prashant, offers no rescue from the dangers of her work. In fact, his drug use, money problems and brushes with violent criminals put her in the way of ever-present harm. But Ruth puts on a tough face and braves the risks of her challenging, urban life for one deeply personal reason: her estranged father lives somewhere in the city. As she searches for her last remaining link with her family, she falls deeper into Bombay’s underworld. But a part of Ruth seems to embrace the danger. That girl in yellow boots is a complex character: brash but sensitive, numbed to men but desperately needing to connect.

 

The transition from actor to director was a smooth one for Aamir Bashir, whose debut feature Autumn  offers a devastating glimpse into the wartorn wasteland of his native Kashmir, where survival is a daily challenge and dreams persist in the face of monumental loss. Bashir’s depiction of this region on India’s border with Pakistan – which has seen tens of thousands of deaths and disappearances since the 1989 outbreak of insurgency – is the meticulous and skilfully restrained work of someone well-acquainted with tragedy.

Rafiq (Shahnawaz Bhat) is a young man with an unsettling, silent bravery. After an unsuccessful attempt to cross the border into Pakistan, he rejoins his parents, who, like him, cannot recover from the disappearance of Rafiq’s older brother Tauqir. His father, Yusuf (Reza Naji), suffers debilitating paranoia, while his mother, Fatima (Shamim Basharat), gets by on hopeful delusion. Rafiq all but sleepwalks through the day, contending with ghostly images of his brother. A flicker of hope finally registers in Rafiq when he finds Tauqir’s old camera with a roll of undeveloped film. Photography (even the act of holding a camera) offers Rafiq a link to the past, a way to cope with the present and a source of hope for the future.

In Kashmir it is eternally autumn. Everything is on the cusp of destruction: parched leaves fall from trees, power lines spark ominously, while anger, fear and despair simmer beneath exhausted veneers. Death is everywhere. The film’s quiet, almost ethereal pacing is punctuated by jarring incidents. The oppressive surveillance of an overbearing military presence is echoed by Bashir’s widescreen framing of shots through door frames and windows; we too are implicated as voyeurs in this humiliating world where privacy does not exist. As tensions rise, Rafiq gravitates increasingly towards his camera, through which the boundaries between dream and reality, vision and hallucination, assume a fluid ambiguity.

Autumn is a remarkable achievement marked by indelible performances and a deeply personal understanding of the politics of family and war.

“Miral is a red flower. It grows on the side of the road. You’ve probably seen millions of them.”

Those words open Miral, which is also the name of the last of four women at the centre of Julian Schnabel’s passionate new film.Those words, with their vivid imagery, their resonance and their ability to act as description,lament and warning all at once, sum up the nuances of this remarkable drama. The setting is Israel and Palestine, from 1948 to the mid-nineties. The tales may not be new,but the telling is.

The first of the four women is Hind Husseini (a real-life figure played by Hiam Abbass). After the 1948 conflict that led to the creation of Israel, Hind happens upon fifty-five newly orphaned children in the streets of Jerusalem. All heart, she takes them in and founds an orphanage for girls that soon houses thousands.

The second woman is Nadia (Yasmine Elmasri), who fled her home after being abused by her father. When a Jewish woman on a bus calls her an “Arab whore,” Nadia bloodies the woman’s nose before being hauled away by the police. In prison she meets the third woman, Fatima who was convicted of planting a bomb in a theatre.The explosive never went off, but Fatima was given two life sentences for the act,and another for not standing politely in the courtroom. Fatima introduces Nadia to her brother, (Alexander Siddiq), who eventually proposes. Together, they have a lovely daughter named Miral (Freida Pinto) – the fourth woman.