advertisement
Indian film director and producer Anand Gandhi, and documentary filmmaker Khushboo Ranka are having a banner year at the Toronto International Film Festival this year. They have two films at TIFF, on issues that are very topical back home.
Gandhi and Ranka share credits on Right To Pray, a seven-minute documentary that is among India’s first virtual reality or VR films, and is playing as part of TIFF’s POP VR event. The film directed by Ranka and produced by Gandhi, takes the viewer right into the eye of the stormy debate over the admission of women into religious places. Although an atheist herself, Ranka came away impressed by the attempt of activists to enter the sanctum of the Trimbakeshwar temple near Nashik earlier this year. But the subject was not chosen specifically for VR, she said in an interview in Toronto.
Gandhi, who is also in Toronto for TIFF, added that he no longer even viewed VR as a novelty medium.
Ranka, along with co-director Vinay Shukla, also brings to TIFF An Insignificant Man, a feature length documentary that followed Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and the emergence of the Aam Aadmi Party or AAP three years ago. The filmmakers were given access to embed themselves within the movement for over a year, capturing Kejriwal and AAP volunteers at rallies, party meetings and protests. The film was originally supposed to premiere at Toronto’s Hot Docs film festival during April-May this year, but was not ready then, and premiered on Sunday, September 11. Ranka was elated at getting a platform at one of the world’s biggest film festivals.
Despite the topical subjects of her films, Ranka was not concerned about events overtaking them, like for instance, the inevitable slide in AAP’s popularity after its heady start. Some of the leaders featured in An Insignificant Man have already made an acrimonious exit from AAP. And the Bombay High Court’s judgment granting women the right to enter the inner area of the city’s Haji Ali dargah came after Right To Pray had been shot.
The major Indian feature films at TIFF this year include Konkona Sen Sharma’s gripping directorial debut A Death In The Gunj, and the return of two masters, Buddhadeb Dasgupta, with The Bait, and Adoor Gopalakrishnan, with Once Again.
Another veteran of Indian cinema, Victor Banerjee, returns in Serbian filmmaker Goran Paskaljevic’s film Land Of The Gods, set in a Himalayan village. Other documentaries at TIFF this year include The Cinema Travellers by Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya, who chronicle the dying tradition of mobile ‘tent cinemas’ that entertain villagers and small town dwellers across India; and Richie Mehta’s India In a Day, the crowdsourced documentary that’s part of the series produced by filmmaker Ridley Scott and Google.
The Indo-Canadian siblings Deepa Mehta and Dilip Mehta are both featured at TIFF this year, the former with Anatomy Of Violence, a look at the infamous Nirbhaya gang rape of December 2012.
Dilip Mehta’s film Mostly Sunny, is a documentary film on one of the most Googled celebrities in India, Sunny Leone, the Indo-Canadian porn actress who has reinvented herself as a Bollywood starlet.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)