From Priyanka Chopra to Anurag Kashyap, Hansal Mehta, his favorite actor Rajkummar Rao and Kalki Koechlin – this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) held earlier this month became a playground for celebrities from the Hindi film industry. The festival featured five new films from India and two Pakistani films with Indian actors. Add to that, TIFF also screened Stephen Frear’s India-focused Victoria and Abdul , with Ali Fazal playing the servant/ teacher to Judy Dench’s Queen Victoria.
That is a remarkable number of films, given that the other major festivals — Cannes and Venice — showed no Indian films this year. Even Berlin programmed only one Indian film — Newton , now India’s official submission for the foreign language Oscar race.
Chopra was in Toronto for a couple of days — for a fundraiser to promote young women filmmakers and also for the world premiere of a Sikkim-based film from her production house Purple Pebble Pictures. “It’s a passion project,” Chopra said about Pahuna: The Little Visitors after the film’s screening. The actor also made a major faux when she got confused between Nepal and Sikkim, and stated more than once that the Northeast Indian state “is troubled with insurgency.” But the audience appreciated director Paakhi Tyrewala’s effort in narrating a small story about Nepali children on the run from the political violence in that country.
Anurag Kashyap was at TIFF for the third time (his That Girl With Yellow Boots and the two-part Gangs of Wasseypur also played at TIFF) with his somewhat of a comeback film — the 153-minutes long boxing saga, Mukkabaaz (the English title for the same at TIFF was The Brawler ). Mukkabaaz opens this year’s Mumbai Film Festival (MAMI). The film is based on a true story about a boxer from a lower caste, played with real sincerity by Vineet Kumar Singh who clashes with his higher caste coach and the villain of the film, Jimmy Shergill. The film is packed with several crowd-pleasing moments, and its ending (no spoiler here) may ensure good box office returns for the film’s producers.
Hansal Mehta’s Shahid played at TIFF in 2012 when the festival’s city-to-city section featured 10 new films from the Hindi film industry. This year Mehta brought his latest project with Rajkummar Rao — Omerta , a gritty tale of the British-Pakistani terrorist Omar Sheikh. The film engaged a lot of conversation around Sheikh’s life. And in what may be the first time for an Indian filmmaker — Mehta was back in Mumbai the same week for the release of his other new film Simran .
Two other Indian films with real indie spirit drew a lot of attention at TIFF. Assamese filmmaker Rima Das showed her second feature film Village Rockstars , a sweet exploration of childhood in a small village in Assam. Beautifully shot and edited by Das herself, Village Rockstars is a quiet little film, with a very large heart.
Bornila Chatterjee whose previous work was the Brooklyn-based indie, Let’s Be Out, The Sun Is Shining , premiered her uber-violent The Hungry , an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s brutal play Titus Andronicus . Starring Naseeruddin Shah, Tisca Chopra, Neeraj Kabi, Sayani Gupta and Suraj Sharma, Chatterjee’s modern day India tale, has two families converging for a wedding, with greed, legal problems, failed business deals and a series of killings adding to the spiced- up film.
Then there were two Pakistani-inspired projects included the heart wrenching What Will People Say , director Iram Haq’s powerful Norwegian-Pakistani story with Adil Hussain and many other Indian actors. Haq even shot substantial part of the film in India, with Udaipur and Ajmer portraying Pakistani cities. When the Norway-born Haq was 14, she was forced by her father to live in Pakistan for a year. She said she felt safer to work in India.
Karachi-born Sabiha Sumar ( Khamosh Pani , 2003) premiered her documentary Azmaish: A Journey Through the Subcontinent, where she collaborates with Kalki Koechlin to explore the similarities between Indians and Pakistanis.
