MAMI film festival: Smashing mainstream boundaries in one week
MUMBAI: Every Mumbai Film Festival morning begins with a frantic search for laptops, smart phones, and an internet connection (if you are an out-of-towner and therefore can’t rely on 24x7 internet). You keep multiple tabs of a booking portal open to reserve tickets for that one film that you just must watch that day.
And later you realize this is not the only option and they have something called spot booking. If you lose that all-important one minute it takes for a sought-after film (Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper, Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman, Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation), you can go to the box office and get that coveted seat. By the time you get the hang of the whole thing, the festival is over. Communication is everything.
In Vikramaditya Motwane’s Trapped, which had its world premiere here, it’s all about communication or the lack of it. A communication paralysis occurs bang in the middle of Mumbai. The film can be about many things. It’s about fear. It’s about really bad things happening to really nice people. It’s about how intensely wired we are to our communication devices and how crazy we can become if they’re pulled away from us. Motwane has made an intelligent film.
In Alankrita Shrivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha, women in Bhopal—in what counts as a Tier-2 city setting—are trapped in myriad ways. It tells the story of four women in different stages of their lives—one a teenager trying to negotiate the ways of a traditional Muslim household, another about to get married but with dreams in her eyes and a paramour in front, a middle-aged housewife kick-starting a late career surge and a widow in her sunset years attempting to swim in a pool and against the harsh currents of prejudice that her age and aspirations seem to attract.
Shrivastava’s film goes to places that one wouldn’t expect a mainstream Hindi film to get to. It’s here to tell four compelling stories that put a mirror in front of patriarchy but doesn’t bother itself trying to smash it. Possibly its bravest decision. The film received the Oxfam India Award For Best Film On Gender Equality at the 18th Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival.