In 1979, Basu Chatterjee made Baaton Baaton Mein and unobtrusively brought to us the dating and courtship rituals of a community that was till then either caricatured or just overlooked in Hindi cinema. Nancy Perreira and Tony Braganza…
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Matriarchal manipulation in a patriarchal world is depicted unsparingly in Usha Priyamwada’s Pachpan Khambe Laal Deewarein (Now playing on Prasar Bharti). The mother resentful of her lecturer daughter’s comfortable life in her college residence because the younger daughters…
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“Start with hope..always start with hope. We went from being a shitty team to become one of the biggest dynasties in the sport and all it needed was one match to light this fire,” says Michael Jordan at…
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In 1947, my grandparents brought three children and the remains of an uprooted life from Pakistan to India in a train. One of those children was my mother. I grew up hearing a lot of stories about the…
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Three documentaries streaming right now show the ultimate culmination of the Bois Locker Room culture. And what happens when one gender is taught to mistrust its instincts of self-preservation and the other does not even learn something as…
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In Sudip Sharma’s Paatal Lok (Now streaming on Amazon. Co written by Sharma, Sagar Haveli, Hardik Mehta and Gunjit Chopra. Directed by Avinash Arun and Prosit Roy), India’s disowned inhabit the headlines we turn away from. A young…
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Ever wondered why disaster movies show iconic architectural landmarks crumbling to pieces? Why terrorist attacks target buildings that stand for something more than just brick and mortar? Why September 11 was not just about a terrorist attack but a terrorist attack on the beating heart of New York? Why 26/11 was not just about […]
Sometime in 2006, United 93, a taut, almost unemotional account of the fourth hijacked plane that did not reach its destination on the morning of September 11 , 2001 hit the theatres. What moved me about the film was its intention to not manipulate the emotions of viewers who had on one terrible morning learnt […]
After a human tragedy, the debri is cleared, remains of lives gathered and mourned and then every year, we revisit in our mind, the Ground Zero of grief and loss and try to make sense of it. Tragedies where innocent lives are lost cannot be contextualised and justified. But yes, some tragedies are better documented […]
On the 66th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a friend sent to me some documentary footage about the day when nothing out of the ordinary had happened in Hiroshima. People were working, heeding traffic lights, having tea and then in a few seconds, like a survivor recalls, from a efficient town going quietly about the […]