Forty-thousand feet up in the air and 11 hours to kill. There’s something about catching up with missed films when suspended in space and time on a flight. The latest I came upon was Nithish Sahadev’s 2023 Malayalam movie Falimy on my way to Marrakesh for the international film festival.
It’s a straightforward narrative about the complicated lives in a dysfunctional family and their convoluted journey to Kashi. Dramatic, with many unexpected twists on the road to Varanasi, the film could have easily become a cloying weepy, but Sahadev’s light-hearted touch keeps it heartwarming.
What surprised me more than the film itself was the reaction of my fellow passenger who noticed me enjoying it. The gentleman from Canada had his curiosity piqued enough to take a peek at the film himself, said he found it relatable, and would be recommending it to his friends. He also declared it didn’t feel like an Indian film and that the quirky ensemble and their crazy journey reminded him a bit of the 2006 Hollywood film Little Miss Sunshine.
It got us talking about Indian cinema, how it largely continues to get identified in the West—not just by the layperson, but cinephiles too—with the song-n-dance and melodrama of commercial Hindi films. The huge success of RRR did appear to have got its foot in the door for other Indian languages. But, as with the airline’s entertainment system, the vexing habit of clubbing all Indian films under the Bollywood umbrella has been hard to break.
Cut to a conversation I recently had with Marathi filmmaker Nikhil Mahajan, whose environment thriller Raavsaaheb competed at the just-concluded IFFI in Goa. Mahajan was making a case for wider global patronage for films like Falimy and his own. That international festivals pick up arthouse Indian films, while at the same time going for commercial Korean cinema, leaves middle-of-the-road filmmakers like him stranded. Semi-commercial films like his have no international festivals to find a home in.
Mahajan thinks that the Indian picks at festivals have a defined aesthetic and show only a certain side of India. Irony is that even arthouse Indian cinema hasn’t had a consistent benefaction internationally. It took 30 years since Shaji N Karun’s Swaham in 1994 for an Indian film to find a place in the competition section at Cannes. No wonder, Payal Kapadia took her own sweet revenge in her Grand Prix acceptance speech for All We Imagine as Light: “Please don’t wait 30 years to have another Indian film.”
Unlike Chinese or Korean cinema, a single, distinct Indian cinematic vocabulary remains elusive for the West to pin it down with. Just like the diversity among our people, languages and cultures, so is it for our cinema. I often try to reduce our multiculturalism for monocultures: think of us as a continent than a country. Similarly, think of our cinema like the motley bunch coming out of Europe, but even they’re more artistically allied than the many-splendoured spread in India—from Punjabi to Bhojpuri, Marathi to Malayalam. The cinema from the Northeast has itself been speaking in lingos as varied as Kokborok and Sherdukpen.
It’s a relevant conversation to have yet again with the world at a time when Indian cinema is having a glorious year—the need to engage with Indian filmmaking in all its diversity and consistently so than offering us flash in the pan acknowledgements and those proverbial 15 minutes of fame.
Meanwhile, our own thought also needs to change radically when it comes to what we think constitutes Indian cinema. Not all commercial films might be necessarily bad and not all indies are about great filmmaking. For the Film Federation of India’s Oscar selection jury to have roundly dismissed AWIAL as “like a foreign film and not Indian cinema” was imprudent. In an increasingly globalised times, all the world should be a stage for young Indian filmmakers with far-reaching exposure and influences from around the world.
Whatever be the influences of AWIAL, what’s important is that it never panders to the West’s expectations of Indian moviemaking. There is an honesty to the lived experience and evocation of urban loneliness on screen, a specificity to the struggles and solidarities of women that transcends boundaries.
It’s the faithfulness to the local that makes it reach out globally. Just as it happened with The Lunchbox or Monsoon Wedding many moons ago. It’s time then to broaden the horizons than trying to narrow definitions. Let a thousand Indian filmmaking flowers bloom.
Namrata Joshi
Consulting Editor
Follow her on X @Namrata_Joshi
