Why ‘In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones’ resonates: ‘No heroes here, just unsure characters’

It’s an Annie kind of weekend, especially in Mumbai. Pradip Krishen’s brilliant campus comedy In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, written by Arundhati Roy, is being released in cinemas for the first time ever on March 13.

Alongside the theatrical release, Annie will be screened in Mumbai at two special events. One is by the Film Heritage Foundation on March 13, at which Krishen and Roy will be present. Before that screening, Krishen will present Annie at the Red Lorry Film Festival (March 13-15). The festival will show Annie alongside Krishen’s two other features, Massey Sahib (1986) and Electric Moon (1992).

Annie was premiered on Doordarshan in a single late-night slot in 1989. The movie went on to become a cult classic, beloved for its realistic depiction of student culture, affectionate character sketches and quotable lines. Roy’s finely written chronicle of architecture students struggling to complete their final year projects drew from her own experiences at the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi in the 1970s.

Roy set Annie in 1974, a year before the Emergency. The fictitious college in the movie has its own dictator in the form of the principal Billimoria (Roshan Seth), who torments the students, especially the idealistic Annie (Arjun Raina). The cast includes Arundhati Roy, Divya Seth, Rituraj and Shah Rukh Khan in a small role.

The Annie revival began in 2025, with a restoration of the original 16mm print by the Film Heritage Foundation headed by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur. The restored version was screened at the Berlin Film Festival in February. Roy was supposed to attend the premiere along with Krishen, but she dropped out after Berlin festival jury chairperson Wim Wenders’s controversial remarks about the relationship between politics and cinema.

In 2015, Roy and Krishen had returned the National Film Awards they won for Annie to protest the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government’s crackdown on free speech.

Also read:

‘In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones’ by Arundhati Roy and Pradip Krishen is a chilled blast from a more tolerant past

Arundhati Roy talks movies: ‘Every person who reads my book has their own film in their head’

Pradip Krishen has moved on from filmmaking to environmentalism, authoring books that include Trees of Delhi: A Field Guide. Krishen has fond memories of the making of Annie, which he feels “still works, somehow, most of the time”. Here are edited excerpts from an email interview.

What was it like to show Annie at the Berlin Film Festival in February?

I was there only for the first screening in the Classics Section. It felt great, but it makes me wonder – how do you gauge an audience’s reaction to a film, especially in a culture once removed from its context? Annie is such a subcultural film, rooted in a particular milieu. Laughs provide one kind of metric, but then Annie is not a comedy built for laughs, even if it has funny moments.

But I got the feeling that nothing was missed, the audience got everything. It was wonderful!

Arundhati Roy withdrew from the Berlin festival. What do you make of her protest?

Arundhati withdrew because of some ill-judged remarks about Palestine by someone in the film jury. The issue blew up into a storm of criticism and Arundhati learnt of this fracas as she was about to leave Paris [where she was attending the launch of her recent book Mother Mary Comes To Me] for Berlin. It didn’t feel right after this for her to come to Berlin. I only learnt of her decision when I was at Doha, halfway to Berlin.

When I spoke on stage before the screening, I said, I am heartbroken that Arundhati isn’t there, but that she took a stand on principle about an issue she believes deeply in, and that I admire and salute her courage for standing up for her beliefs. As she always does. Warm, sustained applause!

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur shared a photo of you with the film’s reels. Was this an emotive moment for you?

I was showing him an old 35mm blow-up reel of Annie that I’d brought up from a steel trunk in my basement. It wasn’t an emotive moment for me.

I didn’t know Shivi, but he’d come all the way from Mumbai specially to take over all the stuff I had dug out from my basement, which I’d been very close to giving away to a kabaadi [scrap dealer]!

Not just old reels but trunks of papers. Scripts, costume drawings, production stills, correspondence with producers, budgets, that sort of thing. At that stage, it was just a handing over of all of this stuff rather than my thinking about restoring the film. That came later.

I felt very detached from my filmmaking past. It was something I had left behind. No emotion! No looking back over my shoulder. Previous life. All change!

Did the restoration meet your expectations?

The restoration was unbelievably good! Shivendra had told me there was a fork in the road for the restoration process – either enhance the original, with all the graininess of the 16mm version, or use AI to clean up completely. And we chose the first alternative (thankfully)!

More than the picture, it was amazing what a good job the lab in Bologna did on the soundtrack, because we had a lot of distracting noise on the original. But cutting-edge digital ways of cleaning up sound have come a long way, and it's possible now to just pluck out a tiny bandwidth of frequencies if you don’t want them there.

How has the film aged – or hasn’t?

I’ve stayed in touch with Annie because there’ve been many occasions to show it to small audiences, unlike my other two films. So it’s not that I was seeing it after a long gap.

I’m always curious about how Annie is received now, after so many years. I get a good feel. Still works, somehow! Most of the time.

In a previous interview with Scroll, Arundhati Roy described how Annie was “the opposite of being ambitious, of thinking that you are going to be some great thing”, and that it had a sense of “radical freedom”. What are your own memories?

We had stopped telling curious people the full title of the film, because it always led to them saying, “Hainh?”

So we shortened it to “Those Ones”. Until one day, shooting on the street, we heard a new morph of this name. Someone had misheard and called it “Do Jawaans”, and that became our preferred name of the film-in-the-making after that.

It was a small film, it really was. Tiny budget, cheap location, 16mm blow-up, inexperienced actors. Except for the script, which was amazing and far from small. So it was important to try and squeeze a good ensemble performance out of the young cast.

There were no heroes here, just somewhat unsure, vulnerable characters. What was asked of them was to shed every instinct they had imbibed about acting for the cinema and to speak as naturalistically as they could.

I was conscious of thinking on a different plane from other directors in the parallel cinema in Mumbai and elsewhere. I felt no affinity with them at all. And that difference helped to craft a distinctive film too.

This is true of all three of my films. But it’s difficult to say what we set out to do without grandstanding. I think we were trying very hard to stay true to a subculture and a milieu that we knew very well and loved.

How did you assemble the cast?

We trawled the amateur English theatre scene in Delhi for our young cast. Most roads led to Barry John’s Theatre Action Group. I conducted an acting workshop that lasted for three weeks not just to do the casting and auditioning, but also to communicate as accurately as I could what I wanted from the actors.

What did I consider over the top? What did I appreciate in a gesture? I was using video playback as a tool, so we’d act out a scene. Such as, you’re standing at a bus stop and you’re very aware of another stranger sitting there, observing you. And you feel like communicating something about yourself to this stranger. Just with your body language. Scenes like that.

I’d look for and encourage self-consciousness, vulnerability and self-effacement. We’d play it back and discuss what we saw. And it worked really well.

Arjun Raina, who plays Annie, was studying drama at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and wasn’t part of this group. But we knew him from before and Arundhati wrote Annie’s part with him specifically in mind. He stepped off the plane and walked straight into the juiciest part any actor could possibly want.

Roshan Seth too – Yamdoot’s part was written with Roshan in mind. So we didn’t need to go around looking to see who the slipper fitted. We had their measurements all along.

Annie was aired on Doordarshan only once. Did you ever think of releasing the film in cinemas?

Just once. Late at night at 10.40pm. With no previous announcement. And lots of bleeps over language they didn’t approve of. Par for the course, I guess. I’m often surprised to meet people who tell me watched it on Doordarshan when it was first shown in 1989.

I never thought of releasing it in cinemas. I recall one or two offers for the video rights, but when we sent them the film, they said and did nothing. Not their cuppa tea, I guess. It’s true, Annie is not everybody’s cuppa tea.

Did Massey Sahib or Electric Moon ever get shown in India?

Not really. Both films were seen once or twice in film festival screenings.

Massey Sahib has been shown many, many times on TV. Massey Sahib was bicycled around theatres in Madhya Pradesh in some kind of triumphal circuit in 1987 because a local boy – Raghuvir Yadav – had won Best Actor at the International Film Festival of India.

But it feels great that all three films are being shown now. I wonder what’s changed?