In terms of cinema, and cinema alone, India is making the kind of splash at Cannes 2024 that it has never done before. Eight Indian-produced or Indian-themed titles, including one in contention for the prestigious Palme d’Or and a 30-minute Virtual Reality piece in the festival’s inaugural Immersive Competition, are strewn across various sections of the 77th edition of the ongoing film festival, which concludes on May 25.
“The Indian presence is extremely strong this year,” said Cannes deputy artistic director Christian Jeune at the start of the festival. He should know, as he has been in charge of scouting Indian films for Cannes for over two decades. “India and China are important markets for films. They are making a strong comeback to Cannes,” the festival’s artistic director Thierry Frémaux had said at the press conference in Paris in the second week of April to announce the official selection.
In the forefront, taking Indian cinema places with their work, are industry names such as Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Radhika Apte, Mita Vashisht, Shahana Goswami, Chhaya Kadam (who has two films in the festival), Anasuya Sengupta and Omara Shetty. Never before have so many faces from the country’s independent cinema space landed in Cannes with something to show for their effort. “I feel the more regional the treatment of a film is, the more it speaks an international language,” said actor Kani in an earlier interview with The Hindu, after the selection of her film All We Imagine as Light for the Palme d’Or award.
Actors Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha in a still from ‘All We Imagine as Light’.
In addition to industry people, this year has also seen a rise in the number of Indian social media influencers as attendees on the red carpet and for seaside photo ops, sponsored by cosmetics and fashion brands for the same. While Aishwarya Rai was at the Croisette as global spokeperson for L’Oreal Paris, fellow actor Kiara Advani represented the country at the Women in Cinema gala dinner.
Actor Aishwarya Rai arrives for the screening of the film ‘Kinds Of Kindness’ at Cannes 2024. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Actor Aditi Rao Hydari ahead of the ‘L’Ete Dernier (Last Summer)‘ red carpet at Cannes 2024. | Photo Credit: WireImage
This is an interesting departure from the first 20-odd years of the new millennium, when India struggled for representation at Cannes and languished on the festival’s fringes. With the tide now turning dramatically and a panoply of actors of quality rightfully walking the red carpet, the question would be: is this only a flash in the pan? Only time will tell.
Beyond underworld dramas
To be sure, the most noteworthy aspect of Cannes’ Indian picks for 2024 is that they signify a marked shift away from Mumbai underworld dramas of the kind that Anurag Kashyap earned currency with. The selected films bear encouraging signs for the future of the country’s indie cinema. Not only is the range of voices and visions on show instantly impressive, the artistic and cinematic merit of the films is beyond question because, for one, none of them is hobbled by market-imposed constraints. These films come from young directors endowed with unique sensibilities. None of them adheres to any genre rules, even those that tell stories located in apparently familiar terrains.
British-Indian filmmaker Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight, in the parallel Directors’ Fortnight selection, is a genre-bending dark comedy. It hinges on a newly-married woman who moves to a Mumbai slum and proceeds to deal with her troubles, one of them caused by her timid husband’s apathy, in a manner more twisted than a wine bottle opener. A sort of feminist and indigenised Gothic tale of vendetta, Sister Midnight, with Radhika Apte in a stellar role alongside Ashok Pathak, Chhaya Kadam and Smita Tambe, shocks and amuses, provokes and tickles. “For me, humour is the most important part of storytelling,” Kandhari said in a post-screening conversation with Julien Rejl, Directors’ Fortnight artistic director. It is easy to see why Sister Midnight is its own beast.
Radhika Apte in a still from ‘Sister Midnight’.
India had a film in virtually every major section of the film festival but Payal Kapadia’s directorial, All We Imagine as Light, was obviously the crowning glory. The trilingual film that tells the story of two Malayali nurses working in Mumbai is the first Indian film to make the cut for the Palme d’Or since Shaji N. Karun’s Swaham in 1994.
For a change, the Indian contingent at this edition of Cannes was big enough, and visible enough, in the festival’s ‘official’ spaces not to be dismissed as a fringe entity. One question that was certainly not being asked this year was: what were so many Indians doing here when the country had no films playing in the festival?
In Cannes Classics, a piece of New Indian Cinema history was celebrated with due pomp, at the well-attended screening of Shyam Benegal’s 1976 film Manthan (The Churning), restored in 4K. Naseeruddin Shah, the only surviving member of the film’s principal cast (Smita Patil, Girish Karnad, Amrish Puri, Sadhu Meher and Shah), said with a mix of bemusement and excitement: “I’ve been acting in films for 50 years, but this is my first time at Cannes.” While Shah had a film — Mrinal Sen’s Genesis, co-starring Om Puri and Shabana Azmi — in the Cannes Official Selection in 1986, he did not attend the premiere.
(L to R) Actor Naseeruddin Shah with film restorer Shivendra Singh Dungarpur and actor Prateik Babbar ahead of the screening of ‘Manthan’ at Cannes 2024. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
The Un Certain Regard sidebar, which too is competitive, had a pair of Indian films: one by a British-Indian woman director, Sandhya Suri, and the other by a Bulgarian helmer, Konstantin Bojanov, who has been visiting the subcontinent for two decades.
“It is tremendously important to open a film at such a prestigious film festival,” said Bojanov, director of The Shameless, starring Mita Vashisht, Anasuya Sengupta, Omara, Tanmay Dhanania, Rohit Kokate and Auroshikha Dey. “I feel it is a first step towards validation of my work.” The Shameless is about a woman who flees a Delhi brothel after killing a police inspector and seeks refuge in a fictional North Indian town, starting a same-sex romance with a young girl from a community of sex workers. It had been in the making for over a decade.
Actors Omara Shetty and Anasuya Sengupta with Bulgarian director Konstantin Bojanov (centre) for the film ‘The Shameless’ at Cannes 2024. Sengupta created history by becoming the first Indian actor to win the Best Actress award at the festival. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
The other Indian film, Suri’s Santosh, was also in development for many years. The project went to the Sundance Directors Lab in 2016. “The idea for Santosh was triggered by an image,” said Suri. “It was a photograph of a policewoman facing a crowd of protesters after the horrific 2012 Delhi gangrape.” She was working with a few NGOs to probe the violence against women in India when she saw the photo. “I would not have had access to the Indian police for a documentary. So, I chose fiction,” she added. Suri’s first film, I for India, a documentary, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival nearly two decades ago. “Developing Santosh was a long and plodding process,” she continued. “It felt really good that it got selected at Cannes.”
Actor Shahana Goswami in a still from ‘Santosh’.
Actors Shahana Goswami and Sunita Rajwar with director Sandhya Suri (centre) for their film Santosh’s outing. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Cheering for Kapadia
It can only augur well for the future of Indian independent filmmaking when a 38-year-old Indian woman filmmaker goes up against world cinema heavyweights such as Paolo Sorrentino, Jia Zhang-ke, Yorgos Lanthimos, Jacques Audiard and David Cronenberg. Kapadia, a Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) alumna, was in Cannes for the third time. She won the best documentary prize in 2021 for A Night of Knowing Nothing. Four years earlier, her short fiction Afternoon Clouds was a part of Cinefondation (now La Cinef), Cannes’ competition for film school students.
Filmmaker Payal Kapadia at the 77th Cannes Film Festival. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
FTII too occupied centrestage at Cannes this year. The institute’s student Chidananda S. Naik’s Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know…, based on a Kannada folk tale reinterpreted for contemporary times, was one of the titles in La Cinef. Mysuru-based Naik studied medicine before enrolling in a one-year course in the TV wing at FTII. Sunflowers… was Naik’s final television film at the institute.
A still from Chidananda S. Naik’s ‘Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know…’
Kapadia’s batchmate Maisam Ali, a Ladakh native born in Iran, also achieved a first by breaking into ACID Cannes with his debut feature, In Retreat. ACID (Association for the Diffusion of Independent Cinema), a section that runs parallel to the festival, had never programmed an Indian film before. In Retreat is an unadorned but richly cinematic exploration of the notion of home and belonging. The film tells the minimalistic story of a man who returns to Leh after a long gap only to find himself baulking at the idea of reconnecting with the place that was once home.
A still from Maisam Ali’s ‘In Retreat’.
“I was clear that I wanted the innards of the place, its interiority. I was not interested in pretty images ,” he said. “We’ve seen a certain kind of imagery of Ladakh on screen. I wanted to avoid that. To my mind, the mere display of culture has no artistic merit. I wanted to show places that I have personal memories of.”
Another India-themed entry was in the newly-introduced Immersive Competition for XR (Extended Reality) projects. Maya: The Birth of a Superhero, is centred on the coming-of-age of South Asian women fighting off shame and fear in their quest for freedom. It is helmed by Kolkata filmmaker Poulomi Basu and C.J. Clarke, and written by them together with British-Indian writer Manjeet Mann. Cannes proved that 2024 could well be the breakout year for Indian independent cinema.
The writer is a New Delhi-based film critic.
Counting influencers
This year saw an especially large contingent of Indian influencers make their Cannes debut. This included Nancy Tyagi, the Delhi-based fashion influencer, who made both her festival outfits, one of them a gown made from 1,000 metres of fabric and weighing almost 20 kg, on her own sewing machine. Once body-shamed for her slender physique, Tyagi rose to fame courtesy her ‘outfit from scratch’ series, where she recreated famous outfits of stars such as Deepika Padukone and Aishwarya Rai.
Among the others were male-beauty influencer Ankush Bahuguna; content creator Viraj Ghelani, who had been invited to attend a screening of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and who posted selfies with Chris Hemsworth; RJ Karishma, who was quite busy sharing her views on the film Kinds of Kindness and its star Emma Stone; and chef Sanjyot Keer, who in recent times, has been posting videos of Ed Sheeran (making misal paav no less) as part of his ‘Your Food Lab’ series.
Most were there at the behest of the official media partner of the Cannes Film Festival, while others were invited to attend film screenings. Nevertheless, social media was rife with people expressing annoyance at Cannes becoming a fashion, rather than a film, spectacle, with one X user wondering ‘what influencers are doing at Cannes… they probably can’t tell a camera from a camcorder’.
Fashion influencer Nancy Tyagi at Cannes 2024.
Male-beauty influencer Ankush Bahuguna at Cannes 2024.
RJ Karishma attends the ‘Kinds Of Kindness’ Red Carpet at the 77th Cannes Film Festival. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
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