The Weight of Expectation
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Virat Nehru
Lali is a Fever Dream of Desire Turning into Dread
Khoosat’s fable exposes an ugly truth: the regularity with which women are expected to absorb male damage in marriages throughout the subcontinent. It’s an indictment of a culture that mistakes endurance for virtue.…
Pradip Kurbah: Future, Tense
Set against the backdrop of a dystopian future where India is celebrating 100 years since independence in 1947, Indian National Award-winning filmmaker Pradip Kurbah’s drama Ha Lyngkha Bneng (The Elysian Field, 2025) probes what kind of tomorrow that will be.…
Aranya Sahay: Child's Play
How should we view our relationship with Artificial Intelligence (AI)? What if AI was like a child, and part of how we train AI algorithms relied on the basics of good parenting? This is the fundamental moral question at the centre of Aranya Sahay’s debut feature, Humans in the Loop.…
Tribeny Rai: Difficult Women
In director Tribeny Rai’s Chhora Jastai (Shape of Momo, 2025), one of the most assured debut features to come out of India recently, the coming-of-age story meets the sensibilities of autofiction and the personal becomes universal.…
MIFF Review: Cast(e) Aside — Reframing ‘Home’ in Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound
Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound (2025) is a reminder that ‘home’ in India is not always a place of refuge—it can be a site of exclusion and humiliation. The title plays on an uncomfortable duality: to be h…
Quiet Reclamations: Payal Kapadia on Malleable Cities, Friendship and the Boy Next Door in Contemporary Indian Cinema
As I wait for my interview with filmmaker Payal Kapadia to commence, I hear the clouds cackle. And right on cue, on a warm summer evening in Sydney, it begins to rain. I smile, thinking that perhaps t…
Monkey Business in a Banana Republic: On Dev Patel's Monkey Man
One of the first things that strikes you when you land in Delhi is that vanar and Hanuman-inspired imagery—drawing from Hindu mythology and texts such as the Ramayana—is everywhere. If you’re catching…