Ritesh Batra’s Hindi-language film Photograph, starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Sanya Malhotra, will be premiered at the Sundance Film Festival that will run between January 23 and February 2, 2019, according to Variety.
Produced by Batra’s studio Poetic License Motion Pictures, the film, also starring Abdul Quadir Amin and Denzil Smith, traces the life of struggling street photographer Rafi (Siddiqui), who persuades Miloni, a reclusive stranger (Malhotra), to pose as his fiancee to escape the pressures of marriage from family. Batra, who made his debut in 2013 with the Irrfan-starrer The Lunchbox, has the films Our Souls at Night (2017) and The Sense of an Ending (2017) to his credit.
Batra’s film will be screened at the festival as a part of its world premiere section alongside 17 other titles. The other films include Bart Freundlich After The Wedding, Sophie Hyde’s Animals, Chiwetel Ejiofor’s The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, Gurinder Chadha’s Blinded By The Light and David Wnendt’s The Sunlit Night.
Films competing under the world cinema category include Sacha Polak’s Dirty God, Gabriel Mascaro’s Divine Love, Shola Amoo’s The Last Tree, Makoto Nagahisa’s We Are Little Zombies and Rodrigo Ordóñez’s This Is Not Berlin. The US Dramatic Competition category will screen 16 films, including Hannah Pearl Utt’s Before You Know It, Jason Orley’s Big Time Adolescence, Chinonye Chukwu’s Clemency and Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy.
According to the Variety report, nine of the 17 filmmakers in competition in the festival’s top prize are women. Kim Yutani, the festival’s director, told Variety that the gender parity in the lineup was organic and indicative of the changing times.
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