Thithi by Raam Reddy
(India, 2015, feature film)
This film is worth your attention for several reasons. If you’re the kind who trusts award juries, well, Thithi has not only won a National Award, it also bagged a Golden Leopard (in the “Filmmakers of the Present” category) at the 2015 Locarno Film Festival, catapulting its debutant director Raam Reddy to overnight fame. Secondly, Thithi uses an entirely non-professional ensemble cast, with the director seeking out villagers from Karnataka’s Mandya district to achieve an unschooled, authentic feel about the film. But really, the reason you should watch this film is its indomitable humanity. Even when the characters are being cruel, there is something undeniably empathetic in their eyes, their body language, their entire being. It is as if they were screaming out “we’re all in this together, we’re all trapped”. But of course, the highlight is the delightfully named Century Gowda, an irascible 101-year-old man who’s the North Star of the film.
Victoria by Sebastian Schipper
(Germany, 2015, feature film)
Remember the Michael Keaton-starrer Birdman, the toast of critics the world over not too long ago? One of the great technical aspects of the film — which eventually became perhaps the single most talked-about things about it — was the trick cinematography employed by Emmanuel Lubezki, wherein the audience felt as if the entire movie was shot in one uninterrupted take.
Victoria, directed by Sebastian Schipper, ups the ante. It has actually been shot in a single take, no tricks: it is one of the few feature films to be made this way. The harrowing story of a young immigrant (the titular Victoria) who gets caught in a drug-fuelled dispute one night in Berlin, Victoria works at several levels: as the classic immigrant dystopian fable, as a straight-up drugs-and-guns action flick, and also as a rare, inward-looking story about a strong, sensitive but pragmatic young woman’s life choices.
Kammaatipaadam by Rajeev Ravi
(India, 2016, feature film)
A Rajeev Ravi film is always an event: remember, Ravi was and is a crucial cog in the Anurag Kashyap wheel: he was the cinematographer for all of Kashyap’s films, including Gangs of Wasseypur, Dev D, Gulaal and Bombay Velvet. There can be no doubt, therefore, that a Rajeev Ravi film will be a visual delight, with expertly planned, sumptuous shots throughout. For his latest directorial venture, Ravi has teamed up with Dulquer Salman, the current heartthrob of Malayalam cinema. Kammaatipaadam is the name of a slum in Ernakulam, Kerala. Much like how Gangs of Wasseypur had the redrawing of city and state lines as a major theme, Ravi’s film tells us how Dalit slum-dwellers were slowly strong-armed out of their houses and lands, by a construction mafia hand-in-glove with local authorities.
Heart of a Dog by Laurie Anderson
(USA, 2015, documentary)
The composer and visual artist Laurie Anderson has dealt with a lot of grief in recent times. Her husband, the rock legend Lou Reed, died in 2013. It was the loss of her dog Lolabelle, however, that this film is primarily about. An extraordinary meditation on the nature of mortality, Heart of a Dog shares its name with a Mikhail Bulgakov novel. Bulgakov was known for his surrealist black humour and while there’s a little bit of that in the film (there’s a sequence where Lolabelle is imagined to go through a purgatory of sorts before reaching heaven), Anderson’s storytelling idioms are unique and cannot really be compared to anyone else.
Ten Years
(Hong Kong, 2015, anthology feature film)
Anthology films are a hit-and-miss business, to be sure. If you get it right, you have something of great thematic unity and flair, like Paris, I Love You. Get it wrong, and what you’ll get is… New York, I Love You. Ten Years is that rare anthology film, then, that not only maintains its storytelling integrity throughout, but also makes a strong political point. It consists of five short films made by different directors: all of them are set ten years in the future, in 2025, when Chinese has squeezed its fists roundly around Hong Kong’s neck, clamping down on human rights and freedom of expression. These are issues previously raised by people like the artist Ai Weiwei: and look what the Chinese government did to him So one fears for the filmmakers a little bit. The best we can do for them is to watch Ten Years. The film teaches us that diktats and bulldozers can destroy the tangible, but cannot touch the human soul.