International Film Festival of India ranges from noisy bravado to quiet delights

Before every film at this year’s International Film Festival of India (IFFI), a brief introductory montage featured a peacock proudly unfurling its colourful plumage. It was a fitting image for the event in Goa, which showed off what the country has to offer cinematically, with exemplars from many of its 28 states and a willingness to tackle historical events and contemporary issues. But attracting attention can also mean inviting criticism — and this too proved to be the case.

Few Indian spectacles are complete without the occasional glittery song and dance number and this was very much to the fore during the lavish and lengthy opening ceremony. A far cry from the sober affairs that inaugurate European film festivals, the opening was loud and splashy, its psychedelic stage show combining an India’s Got Talent aesthetic with earnest speeches from government ministers (IFFI receives substantial state backing) and its own fair share of peacocking. Love Sonia actress Mrunal Thakur got things off to a glittering start before Bollywood superstar Varun Dhawan stole the show with a thrusting, gold-lamé-clad foray into the ecstatic audience.

But when the lights dim, the films must do the talking. This they did eloquently and in a Babel-worthy multitude of tongues. In its 53rd edition, IFFI lived up to its international billing with 280 films from 73 countries, among them highlights from festivals earlier in the calendar such as Spanish film-maker Carla Simón’s Berlin Golden Bear recipient Alcarràs and the Venice prizewinner No Bears, made by imprisoned Iranian dissident Jafar Panahi.

But more novel and enticing for foreign attendees was the opportunity to sample the diverse domestic flavours at the Entertainment Society of Goa in Panaji.

First stop onscreen was Kolkata, birthplace of India’s master film-maker Satyajit Ray and now the setting for Anant Mahadevan’s The Storyteller, a charming and worldly-wise comedy adapted from one of Ray’s myriad short stories. Veteran actor Paresh Rawal stars as Tarini, a mildly curmudgeonly Bengali creator of fiction who is hired by a wealthy but chronically insomniac Gujarati cotton mogul (Adil Hussain) to tell him bedtime tales (“He sells cotton, I spin yarns”). What begins as a study of gently clashing cultures (Tarini smuggling fish into his host’s vegetarian home, secretly feeding his cat) gradually reveals its claws, digging into questions of authenticity, deception and plagiarism.

What would the urbane Ray have made of the maximalist RRR? SS Rajamouli’s Telugu-language historical epic, already a domestic smash, continues to become a worldwide phenomenon, raking in north of $100mn with its mix of stylised violence, revisionist history and chest-pounding proclamation of Indian unity. At IFFI it played to a giddy crowd that whooped through its outré action sequences, hyperkinetic dance numbers and cartoonish depiction of British Raj officers as oafish panto villains (think Indiana Jones’s Nazis snarling the King’s English). The latter seems to reflect a wider recent trend among Indian films and streaming series that tackle history with a new assertiveness, emboldened no doubt by the nationalist fervour that has swept India since the rise of prime minister Narendra Modi’s BJP party.

At least two new films at IFFI demonstrated this trend. Khudiram Bose is a hagiographic portrait of the freedom fighter whose attempt in 1908 to assassinate a British judge resulted in the death of two British women. Shakily assembled on a visibly low budget, it allowed no room for nuance and showed none of RRR’s wit or guile by presenting a po-faced and one-sided version of history.

Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files meanwhile is an unsparing account of the persecution of Hindu Kashmiri Pandits in the early 1990s. Its graphic imagery and three-hour running time have not prevented the film from becoming a hit at the Indian box office, buoyed by praise from Modi himself, but has met with resistance in other countries — it was briefly banned in the United Arab Emirates earlier this year and remains so in Singapore for its “provocative and one-sided portrayal of Muslims”. At the IFFI closing ceremony, Israeli jury president and film-maker Nadav Lapid caused a minor diplomatic incident by labelling it “a vulgar movie inappropriate for an artistic competitive section of such a prestigious film festival” and expressing surprise at its inclusion. He optimistically expressed his belief that “the festival can surely accept also a critical discussion, which is essential for art and life” but inevitably a furious backlash on social media followed, Israel’s ambassador to India, Naor Gilon, stepping in, unbidden, to apologise on Lapid’s behalf.

Fewer in number were films that tackled contemporary issues. One outlier was Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Lost, a Kolkata-set thriller that charts a female journalist’s investigation into the disappearance of a young theatre actor accused of Maoist terrorism. As a genre piece, its over-reliance on well-worn tropes — endless confused forays down dusty backstreets despite the presence of Google Maps; key plot words scribbled on notepads and vigorously underlined — but its professional female lead (Yami Gautam) and willingness to probe institutional corruption were refreshing. Most urgent was the reminder of India’s alarmingly high rate of disappearing persons — a child is reported missing every eight minutes.

Female protagonists were also front and centre in Dhabari Quruvi, the anguished tale of a 15-year-old village girl trying to rid herself of an unwanted pregnancy. Priyanandanan’s film would have been remarkable enough for promoting the idea of a young woman’s right to choose — a notion controversial in Kentucky, let alone remote rural Kerala. What made it even more noteworthy was the casting of only indigenous tribal actors — a first for any Indian movie.

More rural drama, albeit one of far lower stakes, lay at the centre of the soufflé-light fable Kurangu Pedal, set in the 1980s summer holidays in a village in Tamil Nadu. Again there was a touch of Ray discernible in the Apu-ish figure of the 12-year-old boy Maari, whose thirst for cycling adventure and determination to surpass his “pedestrian” father leads him into trouble and eventually a transcendent break from the past.

That the influence of Ray was still keenly felt 30 years after his death and 2,000km from his home town was reinforced by two sprawling walls of posters on the festival grounds proclaiming “The One and Only Ray”. The polymath auteur’s own work as a graphic artist was also on display in Other Ray, a documentary paying homage to the film-maker’s less storied work as a designer of everything from film posters and book jackets to advertising and children’s literature. The fact that the screen was filled with a constant array of images and still only seemed to scratch the surface of his output justified the film’s awed narration.

The considerable task of following this reverential celebration fell to Three of Us, with which it was paired in a double bill. Any connection to Ray was not made explicit, but this delicate Hindi-language drama rose to the occasion regardless. Made with touching humanism and an eye for understated humour and poignancy by cinematographer turned first-time director Avinash Arun, it was led by the gently luminous Shefali Shah as a middle-aged Mumbai woman with the beginnings of dementia who takes her amiable husband on a journey to her past and her coastal childhood home in Vengurla, just north of Goa.

Here was a film that displayed all the grace and subtlety that were sometimes missing in other parts of the festival, a clear sign that Indian cinema continues to deserve the world’s attention — and not only when it shouts loudest.

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