The recently-concluded 21st edition of the Mumbai Film Festival featured an array of international talent including Ari Aster ( Midsommar ), Oliver Laxe ( Fire Will Come ), Hany Abu-Assad ( Omar ) and many more. The festival’s Indian selections were remarkable, but you can read about them elsewhere in these pages. My personal international favourites were an astonishing début and a master working at the peak of his powers.
I was fortunate enough to be asked to moderate the Q&A session for the Tunisian film, A Son , directed by feature débutante Mehdi Barsaoui. Set in rural Tunisia, shortly before the Arab Spring of 2011, the film follows an affluent Tunisian couple visiting from France with their 11-year-old son. They find themselves in the middle of a terrorist attack and a random bullet wounds the boy, leaving him fighting for his life, in desperate need of a liver transplant. During the search for a compatible liver, a dark family secret is exposed, leaving the couple’s relationship on the rocks. The film features brilliant performances by Najla Ben Abdallah and Sami Bouajila, who won best actor at the Venice Film Festival’s Horizons strand earlier this year, and is shot in mesmerising fashion by Antoine Heberle ( Paradise Now ). I asked Barsaoui if the oeuvre of Iranian master Asghar Farhadi, in particular, A Separation , is an influence on his work, and indeed it is. Barsaoui has already won the young talent award at Hamburg and he and the film are going places.
Thanks to Netflix, who has a strong relationship with the Mumbai Film Festival — this year featuring no less than six titles from the giant streamer — audiences were treated to a masterclass by Brazilian icon Fernando Meirelles who captured the global imagination with City of God (2002), and hasn’t looked back since. The filmmaker is passionate and pessimistic about the current global response to the ongoing climate crisis, and his next film for Netflix is on the topic. Parts of it will be shot in India, standing in for Bangladesh. Also an ardent farmer, Meirelles said that he is planting as many trees on his property as he can.
This masterclass was preceded by a screening of the Netflix-produced The Two Popes . The screenplay is adapted by Anthony McCarten ( Bohemian Rhapsody ) from his own stage play, and is about a series of conversations between the conservative Pope Benedict and his eventual successor, the liberal Pope Francis. A two-hour talkathon between two men could have been a crashing bore, but it isn’t. Obviously not, given that the actors playing the two Popes are amongst the best in the business — Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce — who, along with delivering acting masterclasses, are clearly having a great time. The script is terrific, combining wit, laugh-out-loud humour and pathos in equal measure. Along with the capacity audience, I laughed, I clapped and, at some point, I was surprised to notice that my cheeks were wet. I can’t wait to watch it again. The filmmaking is transcendental, using mixed media to great effect. Is Meirelles a great filmmaker? Is the Pope Catholic?
