This year’s edition of the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (April 23-26) has a crisp selection that isn’t restricted to India but extends to offerings from the subcontinent. While India has contributed compelling titles, there are noteworthy movies from Pakistan and Bangladesh too.
Anuparna Roy’s Songs of Forgotten Trees is part of the programme. Roy’s remarkable feature debut, starring Naaz Shaikh and Sumi Baghel, explores the dynamic between two flatmates. Thooya, an aspiring actress, and Shweta, an IT sales executive, are migrants to Mumbai, adjusting to its unsettling rhythms and to each other within the rooms and corridors of the house they share.
Also from India is another assured debut, Tribeny Rai’s Shape of Momo, in which a young woman moves back to her home in Sikkim, only to run into minor and major emotional crises. Led by Gaumaya Gurung, the film examines the meaning of womanhood in a society that prefers male children and places limits on self-expression.
Anusha Rizvi’s The Great Shamshuddin Family is also about the joys and tensions that bubble away within the most basic social unit. An academic trying to complete a presentation is constantly interrupted by a wave of visitors, from her mother and aunt to her sister and her colleague.
Set entirely within an apartment in Delhi, the film has a bunch of terrific actors, mellifluous Urdu dialogue and a rare examination of middle-class Muslim life at a time when the Indian government is determined to demonise the community.
Two documentaries are part of the programme. In Breaking the Code, filmmaker Ben Rekhi profiles his father, the Indian American entrepreneur Kanwal Rekhi. This story of immigration has a happy outcome, unlike Karla Murthy’s The Gas Station Attendant.
Murthy’s documentary is a rare exploration of an Asian immigrant family facing failure. The half-Filipino and half-Indian Murthy focuses on her father, Sundar Murthy, who emigrated from Bengaluru to the United States decades ago.
Sundar held a number of positions and ran several businesses to keep his large brood going. Among the jobs he resorted to in order to pay off his huge debts was at a petrol pump. Karla Murthy uses home video footage and audio recordings to explore not only Sundar’s experiences, but also her own journey.
The film provides a sobering view of the American Dream. There’s compromise but also resilience, regret as well as deep love. The theme of “debts and disappointments” runs through the deeply personal and poignant documentary, whose producers include the Oscar-nominated Geeta Gandbhir.
There’s family and more in Sarmad Khoosat’s buzzy Lali. A seasoned creator of television shows and films (including the biopic Manto) and an actor too, Khoosat brings considerable heft to a strange, seductive tale of repression, possession and paranoia.
Inspired by Nasreen Qureshi’s short story Kaala Kambal, Lali is initially darky funny and then dark. Set in a small town in Pakistan, Lali explores the fragile marriage between Zeba (Mamya Shajaffar) and Sajawal (Channan Hanif). Zeba is considered a bad omen, with a past that includes a dead lover. Sajawal has an inferiority complex because of a prominent birthmark that covers half his face.
Zeba must also deal with Sajawal’s boisterous mother Sohni (Mehr Bano), the mentally challenged neighbour Bholi (Rasti Farooq), and a posse of young men who worship Sohni. Zeba’s battle to establish herself in her marital home is accompanied by gorgeous colour-coded, suitably jarring camerawork by Khizer Idrees and a haunting score by Abdullah Siddiqui that Khoosat uses beautifully throughout the film.
Lali is unpredictable from start to finish. There’s no telling how characters will react or evolve. The excellent performances reflect the script’s normalised bizareness.
Khoosat deftly handles the sudden narrative swerves, his grasp slipping only in the melodramatic climax. The movie’s editor and co-producer is Saim Sadiq, who directed the wonderful Joyland (2022), another bold swing at unseen aspects of Pakistani culture.
A jinn, or something like it, haunts Lali as well as Seemab Gul’s Ghost School. Gul’s movie is about the precocious Rabia, whose school is shut down after rumours that a jinn has possessed a teacher.
Rabia takes it upon herself to find out the truth. Her adventure has big hints of a dream during the daytime. She wanders in and out of spaces where girls like herself would not be permitted.
The film is occasionally stilted and labours its allegorical themes. Pakistan itself appears to be the titular school, caught in the throes of superstition, poverty and backwardness. Nazualiya Arsalan’s spirited performance as Rabia is among the highlights.
From Bangladesh comes a certified gem. Mahde Hasan’s Sand City is a visually stunning, artistically ambitious study of a man and a woman eking out a living in Dhaka. Both are obsessed with sand for different reasons. Both find ways to feed their preoccupation.
Alone in their respective houses, and alienated from Dhaka’s incessant clutter, the characters live parallel lives despite rarely crossing paths. The plot takes an unusual turn when the sand throws up a cellphone… and then a finger.
Just 0.2% of readers pay for news. The others don’t care if it dies. You can help make a difference. Support independent journalism – join Scroll now.
We’re not driven by clicks or corporate interests – just honest, independent reporting. Keep us going. Support Scroll today!