Winds From The East

Gulabi is no pin-up model, yet her smile still lingers in my memory even after the movie and the Osian film festival long ended. She seemed so rooted in the ethos of her culture that almost all her gestures in the film are universal in their portrayal and reflection on life. The way she ate, the way she talked, the way she walked and the way she behaved formed a ritual play of gestures and expression unlike any other. The foundation on which the film explores the duality of human behavior- setting a story of an individual against a large socio-economic and political scenario makes this a remarkable and a masterfully conceived film. This very theme also forms a major backdrop for the eleven odd films directed by the master Girish Kasaravalli. Gulabi Talkies is a film in transit, where every second of screen time reveals something about who we really are, beneath it all. Gulabi who is an expert mid-wife is neglected by a number of people for being a Muslim woman, but she still manages to...

We often went to the movies. The screen lit up and we trembled…But more often than not Madeleine and I were disappointed. The pictures were dated, they flickered. And Marilyn Monroe had aged terribly. It made us sad. This wasn’t the film we’d dreamed of. This wasn’t the total film that each of us had carried within himself...the film we wanted to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, that we wanted to live. Paul, in Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin‑féminin Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na is a film of the 21st century, born under the eyes of the producers, marketed viciously under the lens of the PR team, hyped and buzzed to such a state that one is made to believe this one would be different from everything else being made in the country. But like many of its similitude’s in Bollywood, this film too is just a marketing gimmick. It does not have the naïve innocence or even a well carried narrative like QSQT(Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak), neither does it have well laid characters like Dil Chaatha Hai, nor does it...

Aakrosh Directed - Govind Nihalani Cast: - Naseerduddin Shah, Om Puri, Smita Patil, Amrish Puri Winner of 6 Filmfare awards (it meant something back then) Twenty minutes into the movie, and most of my friends started flinching in their seats, “Is that how a, ‘typical’ Indian art film is supposed to look and feel?” one of them said. I didn’t have an answer, how, an art film is supposed to look, but proposed to let the movie go on; since this was not the first time I had been screening films (originals) in our little flat here in Delhi, which usually followed up with some healthy discussion on the movies. When the film finally ended, most people in the small cramped room, didn’t say a word - but the very same friend who questioned the legitimacy of art, and laughed how Om Puri looked in the film, said in a very grave tone voice, “Nothing much has changed ever since”, true as he said - and he was absolutely right in his cumulative evaluation of the film- Nothing much has changed since the...