The 35th Toronto International Film Festival has put its stamp of endorsement on
the emergence of Mumbai cinema’s ‘new wave’, writes Saibal Chatterjee

THE 35th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), running from September 9 to 19, marks a fresh beginning for North America’s foremost cinema event. On the festival’s first Sunday, TIFF will formally move into Bell Lightbox, its spanking new permanent home that was four years in the making.

The ‘new’ Bollywood has, of course, been far longer in the works. Its emergence is set to be duly acknowledged at TIFF 2010.

Even as TIFF opens a new chapter in its eventful history, its engagement with the cinema of the world’s most prolific film-producing nation has reached the point of an exciting new departure. Reflecting the significant changes that are sweeping through Mumbai filmdom, this year’s TIFF selection has already put the process into orbit.

None of the four Indian films that have made the 2010 TIFF cut is a typical song-and-dance Bollywood production although two of them have their roots firmly in Mumbai.

The other two Indian entries — Aamir Bashir’s Harud (Autumn), set in Kashmir, and Siddharth Srinivasan’s Pairon Talle, a dark tale that plays out on a surreal location on the outskirts of Delhi — are debut efforts that will compete with the work of 25 other first-time filmmakers in TIFF’s Discovery programme.

In the 2009 edition of TIFF, The Man beyond the Bridge, a Konkani film crafted by Vasco-based Laxmikant Shetgaonkar, bagged the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize for the Discovery section.

This year, debutante Kiran Rao’s Dhobi Ghat and Anurag Kashyap’s latest film, That Girl in Yellow Boots, focus on different aspects of the teeming metropolis.

The cast of the former is headed by Aamir Khan playing a reticent painter, while the latter features Kalki Koechlin as a biracial woman, who works in a massage parlour without a permit and banks upon her wits to navigate her way through Mumbai’s underbelly.

Add to Dhobi Ghat and That Girl... The Sound of Mumbai: A Musical, a Sarah McCarthy documentary about a bunch of slum children who perform The Sound of Music with a classical orchestra, and you a have trio of films that will put the city under the TIFF spotlight two years after Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire helped a rarely seen side of Mumbai grab global headlines.

In the past few years, TIFF has consistently showcased full-on Bollywood films, with a slew of Mumbai movie stars in attendance. This list of films has included the likes of Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, Singh is Kinng, Dil Bole Hadippa! and What’s Your Raashee? But this year, Dhobi Ghat and That Girl... have emerged out of the same space but from a completely different sensibility. And that is precisely what TIFF 2010 is celebrating.

TIFF’s co-director and selector of Indian films, Cameron Bailey, describes Dhobi Ghat as "a major step forward for Indian filmmaking". In the official TIFF catalogue, he writes: "It took years for American independent cinema to develop its own narrative voices in contrast to Hollywood storytelling. In India, the emergence of a contemporary Indie style is happening right now."

It is the same sort of excitement that Anurag Kashyap brings to the TIFF table with That Girl in Yellow Boots. Cameron says: "As India’s independent film movement surges, Anurag Kashyap is at the forefront of the action... This is an enormously stylish film, crafting intimate pockets within the city, where layered performances can unfold. In both style and subject, Kashyap defines the pulse of today’s Hindi independent cinema..."

TIFF, which has traditionally promoted the films of Indian auteurs like Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Buddhadeb Dasgupta, seems to have now found the same sort of piercing artistic vision in a filmmaking domain that is far closer to the domestic movie mainstream.

Harud is, however, as far from the centre of Bollywood as any Indian film has ever been. Actor-turned-director Bashir chose real locations to film this profoundly personal story of a young Kashmiri boy struggling to come to terms with the disappearance of his elder brother until he stumbles upon an old camera and an undeveloped film roll inside it.

Harud, which is described by Bailey as "a remarkable achievement marked by indelible performances", stars veteran Iranian actor Reza Naji, known the world over for his performances in Majid Majidi’s critically acclaimed Children of Heaven and The Song of Sparrows.

These films, which represent a marked break from the established Indian cinematic conventions, are squarely rooted in an acute awareness of the directions world cinema is currently taking. None more so than Pairon Talle, an exploration of oppression and rebellion through the story of a subservient watchman, who faithfully guards his master’s abandoned silica mine on the outskirts of Delhi.

Acclaimed British documentary filmmaker Kim Longinotto’s Pink Saris tracks the activities of the Gulabi Gang, a band of feminists that brings justice to victims of violence in male-dominated Uttar Pradesh. Led by the intrepid Sampat Pal Devi, these real-life vigilantes confront social and gender prejudices head-on.

India watchers in Toronto will also have their eyes on Freida Pinto, who stars in two much-awaited films in the TIFF line-up — Julian Schnabel’s Miral and Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. The petite Pinto is clearly going places. As is the new Bollywood cinema.

HOME