Onir’s anthology I Am (2010) remains one of the most deeply felt and insightful cinematic statements on Kashmir where Juhi Chawla’s Megha (a Kashmiri Pandit) and Manisha Koirala’s Rubina (a Kashmiri Muslim) connect after twenty years of estrangement amid barbed wires, abandoned, crumbling homes with bullet riddled walls and layers upon layers of anger and […]
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Tag: Onir
Sanjay Suri: Enduring Courage
Actor and producer Sanjay Suri is a quiet, enduring presence in an industry that thrives on noise. As the producer on the cusp of the release of his new projects including the internationally acclaimed Chauranga, he looks back at the years when he was still discovering what it means to be a part of the […]
Irene Dhar Malik: Editor’s Cut
Filmmaker Onir’s soon to be released film Chauranga taps into the prevalent politics over love and caste. It narrates the story of a 14-year-old Dalit boy in rural India who is killed for writing a love letter. Irene Dhar Malik, Onir’s sister and film editor, is busy with the post-production of the film and took […]
Love Beyond Gender
Society in India is coming of age. It has begun to openly acknowledge the word ‘gay,’ before kids and in movies etc. Unfortunately our minds are not open enough to accommodate and treat the gay community with the same respect that we accord to heterosexuals. There is a subtle stigma attached to this word which […]
I Am Not Invisible…
In the 1950s, Ralph Ellison wrote a novel called Invisible Man about the existential invisibility of African Americans and how the ‘other half’ simply did not see them. Their stories did not matter because no one acknowledged them as real. Among many other unforgettable lines, were these, “I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me. You often doubt if you really […]
I AM ONIR…
Anirban Dhar or Onir, as we know him now, makes disconcerting films that disturb the equanimity with which Hindi cinema is watched. They ask questions not all of us are willing to face or answer. The abiding sense of isolation running through his work is not romantic or self-indulgent. It instead takes us into the heart and mind of an ostracised AIDS patient in My Brother Nikhil… This was a film that […]