Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light will be the opening title at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival that will run between October 19 and 24. Kapadia’s first feature – she has previously made shorts and documentaries – won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival earlier in the year. Kapadia is the first Indian ever to win the honour.
All We Imagine As Light, about three women working at a hospital in Mumbai and their encounters with love and loss, will be released by Rana Daggubati over the next few weeks in India. The multi-lingual movie was overlooked as India’s entry in the international feature category at the Oscars in favour of Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies.
Interim festival director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur said in a press statement, “We’re delighted to open the festival this year with a film that has the city of Mumbai at its heart. All We Imagine as Light will always be remembered as a film that won the Grand Prix at Cannes, but it is also an independent film that faced many challenges, especially in finding funding, before it debuted in competition at Cannes and won accolades all over the world.”
The MAMI Mumbai Film Festival will close with another Cannes-decorated movie, Sean Baker’s Anora, about an exotic dancer’s relationship with a wealthy Russian businessman. Anora won the highest honour at Cannes, the Palme d’Or.
This year’s edition, which doesn’t have a title sponsor, is a scaled-down affair. The films will be shown at two venues in Mumbai: Regal and PVR Juhu.
The significant titles in the world cinema section include Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud, Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me, Hong Sangsoo’s A Traveler’s Needs, An Urban Allegory by Alice Rohrwacher and JR, India Donaldson’s Good One.
Also in this category are Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, Rumours by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson, Olivier Assayas’s Suspended Time, Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle and Truong Minh Quy’s Viet and Nam.
The competition section has movies from across South Asia. Among the 11 films are Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, starring Shahana Goswami as a police constable thrown into a tricky investigation.
Also in this category are Agent of Happiness by Arun Bhattarai, Dorottya Zurbo, Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls, Midhun Murali’s animated Kiss Wagon, Lawrence Valin’s Little Jaffna, the documentary Nocturnes by Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan, Amit Dutta’s documentary Rhythm of a Flower, Min Bahadur Bham’s Shambhala, Raam Reddy’s The Fable, Rima Das’s Village Rockstars 2 and Deepak Rauniyar’s Pooja, Sir.
Among the documentaries are A Fly on the Wall by Nilesh Maniyar and Shonali Bose, Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl, No Other Land by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Kinshuk Surjan’s Marching in the Dark, Roya Sadat’s The Sharp Edge of Peace and Cedric Dupire’s The Real Superstar.
An out-of-competition section will screen the premieres of Kanu Behl’s Despatch (starring Manoj Bajpayee and Shahana Goswami), Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Ghamasaan (starring Arshad Warsi and Pratik Gandhi), Sonal Darbal’s Go Noni Go (starring Dimple Kapadia and Manav Kaul), the anthology My Melbourne directed by Kabir Khan, Imtiaz Ali, Onir, Rima Das, and Suman Ghosh’s The Ancient (starring Sharmila Tagore, Rituparna Sengupta and Indraneil Sengupta).
Four restored classics will be screened: Burden of Dreams by Les Blank and Maureen Gosling, Camp de Thiaroye by Ousmane Sembene and Thierno Faty Sow, Nirad Mohapatra’s Mayi Miriga and Girish Kasaravalli’s Ghatashraddha.
