Something unusual happened at the movies for me at the very start of 2024. An imperturbable film buff that I consider myself, for the first time in my life I walked out of a Hindi film at the interval. It felt like an unbearable confinement, a waste of precious hours on an entity that offered neither any delight and insight, nor nourishment for the aesthetic urges of the soul. As the year ends, Fighter features among the top 10 Hindi grossers; it’s a different matter whether it got enough return on investment or not.
So, to cut to the chase, the dominant trend of past few years continued into Bollywood 2024. A handful of largely execrable films minted vulgar crores, and the deserving ones got “discovered” later on OTT platforms, ensuring that the balance of power at the box office continued to favour the mediocre moneybags than the daring visionaries, as it always has.
As things hit an all-time low, the speculations about Bollywood’s financial health were rife after the news of vaccine king Adar Poonawalla’s Serene Production shelling out Rs 1,000 crore to buy a 50 percent stake in Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions.
Of the mainstream Hindi cinema I watched, the one which was satisfying, with quibbles intact, was Imtiaz Ali’s musical Amar Singh Chamkila, the biopic of Punjab’s popular performer of “naughty songs”.
Atul Sabharwal’s Berlin—about a plot to assassinate Russian president Boris Yeltsin on his visit to India in 1993—is a spy thriller riding on atmosphere and intrigue.
Dharmatic Entertainment’s mini docu-series, Love Storiyaan, was a remarkable peep into the world of six real-life couples and their uncommon pursuit of love across the divides of religion, caste and countries, with women having agency and equality in the relationships.
In the times of unabashedly hypermasculine portrayals in the so-called pan-Indian cinema, it was gratifying to find the year’s Bollywood crown claimed by the utterly fallible but likeable and vulnerable man next door, Rajkumar Rao—with Srikanth, Mr and Mrs Mahi, Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video—and with his Stree 2 turning out to be an all-time blockbuster.
Dinesh Vijan’s production house Maddock Films owned 2024, delivering the ghostly Stree 2 and Munjya, and robot romcom Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya.
However flawed they may have been, it was heartening to see a progressive streak running through the top two Hindi hits, both from horror franchisees—Stree 2 addressing gender politics and Bhool Bhulaiyya 3 had a surprising gay angle.
However, the best bit about 2024 has been the terrific women-centric films in the alternative circuit, many of them directed by women. It has been an incredible year for India’s indie female filmmakers, starting with Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls winning an audience award at Sundance, while its lead actress, Preeti Panigrahi, bagged the special jury award for acting.
Enough has deservedly been written about Payal Kapadia’s debut feature All We Imagine As Light, which created history for India by winning the Grand Prix at Cannes and has subsequently won every possible foreign film award despite being snubbed by the Film Federation of India selection panel for Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies as India’s entry at the Oscars.
Rima Das’s sequel to her acclaimed 2017 Assamese film, Village Rockstars 2, bagged the Kim Jeseok award at the Busan International Film Festival. Lakshmipriya Devi’s Manipuri film Boong played in Toronto and went on to win the best youth film prize at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards in Australia. Subhadra Mahajan’s Second Chance premiered at Karlovy Vary and Nidhi Saxena’s Sad Letters of an Imaginary Woman did so at Busan.
In the world of documentaries, Nocturnes, co-directed by Anupama Srinivasan and Anirban Dutta, won a special jury award at Sundance and Nishtha Jain’s Farming the Revolution was the best international feature at Hot Docs.
The irony is that while these films have had the whole world as their playground, Indian audiences have not quite warmed up to them—a proper release here is still an uphill task.
The best Bengali film this year, debut directorial of Abhinandan Banerjee, Manikbabur Megh, did manage to break the jinx with a successful limited, staggered commercial release.
Dominic Sangma’s ideologically grounded, deeply humane Garo film Rapture came home through community-based screenings in Meghalaya.
A late discovery for me has been Aranya Sahay’s extraordinarily layered Humans in the Loop, that brings AI and Adivasi reality together while taking us through a woman’s attempts to mend her strained relationship with her adolescent daughter.
Another admirable woman on screen was the stoic yet subversive Sanjeevani, the widow of a farmer who died by suicide, in Kinshuk Surjan’s Marching in the Dark, a documentary about female solidarity amid adversity in rural Maharashtra.
PS Vinothraj’s Tamil film Kottukkaali that played at the Berlinale was a brilliant study of opposing forms of anger—one explosive and the other silent. Another Tamil film to hit the sweet spot was C Prem Kumar’s Meiyazhagan, with Arvind Swamy’s inward-looking cynicism meeting its match in Karthi’s open-hearted sense of inclusiveness to underscore the power of human connection.
Christo Tomy’s Malayalam film Ullozhukku (Undercurrent) about two flawed but wonderful women who confront the secrets and betrayals and rise above to find strength and support in each other, had Urvashi and Parvathy Thiruvothu acing it.
Thiruvothu is also one of the prime movers in the Women in Cinema Collective, which was instrumental in pushing for the Hema Committee to be set up and expose violations against women in the Malayalam film industry.
Namrata Joshi
Consulting Editor
Follow her on X @Namrata_Joshi