Manthan on the French Riviera

IN 1976, SMITA PATIL and Shabana Azmi walked the red carpet clad in handloom sarees, accompanied by their director Shyam Benegal. The film being premiered was Nishant, the second in Benegal’s village trilogy. Manya Patil Seth, Smita’s younger sister, remembers the actor preparing for the Cannes Film Festival.

Ten years later, Patil was dead, from complications in childbirth. Yet says Manya, she is always amazed at how Smita’s “name has an enduring life in our collective memory for the ex­traordinary films and the people who were her comrades”. This week, as Manya, her sister Anita Patil-Deshmukh, a public health advocate; Smita’s son, actor Prateik Babbar; actor Naseeruddin Shah; Verghese Kurien’s daughter Nirmala; and film archivist Shivendra Singh Dungarpur walk the red carpet at the premiere of Manthan, they will celebrate a remarkable actor in a film that has been restored painstakingly over 18 months. Benegal, 89, and on dialysis, won’t be attending.

Manthan, funded by 5,00,000 dairy farmers of Gujarat who contributed ₹2 each, tells the story of the cooperative milk revo­lution in Sanganva, Gujarat, through the eyes of a veterinarian (the late Girish Karnad, playing a version of Kurien) and the villagers led by Bindu (Smita Patil) and Bhola (Naseeruddin Shah). Its print, restored by Dungarpar’s Film Heritage Foundation, will be one of seven films from India at the festival, marking a change from recent years where fashion influencers and brand ambassadors overshadowed cinema.

The star of the indie invasion at the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival (May 14 to 25) from India is Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, which is in Competi­tion, the first Indian film to break a 30-year jinx in this section. Kapadia, daughter of artist Nalini Malani, has been to Cannes before, with her documentary, A Night of Knowing Nothing, loosely based on protests at her alma mater, Film and Televi­sion Institute of India (FTII), Pune. It won the Golden Eye for Best Documentary at Cannes in 2021. Meenakshi Shedde, independent curator, who has been working in South Asian programming with the Berlin, Toronto and Mumbai film festivals, is all praise for Kapadia, who she says is emblematic of the new indie wave.

Shedde says, “The reason there is a relatively stronger presence of Indian and South Asian films at a lot of A-list festivals, including Cannes, is that the younger generation is not only very talented, working in diverse regional languages (for instance, Payal Kapadia is from North India, but her film All We Imagine as Light, is in Malayalam); many know how to work the international lab/script mentor/co-production circuit, that smoothens the way for festival selection; many have an awareness of what Western festivals look for, and some, like Payal Kapadia, have smartly even listed a distribu­tor, international press agent and French press agent, before Cannes began.”

Add to that, boundaries are blurring. Konstantin Bojanov, a Bulgarian director, has made a film, The Shameless, in Nepal, with mostly Indian actors, which features in the Un Certain Regard category. Mita Vashisht, who plays a strong-minded matriarch in it was filming in Varanasi when she got a call about The Shameless. She spoke to Bojanov from a funky cafe in Varanasi (which in hindsight looked a lot like it could be in Kathmandu, with even a bicycle hanging on the wall) and agreed to read the script. She liked what she read but had a few suggestions. “I was surprised that Konstantin was open to mak­ing the changes even though he had started filming,” she says. Vashisht has been acting since 1987 when Yash Chopra cast her as Sridevi’s friend in Chandni and has worked with an array of formidable filmmakers from Mani Kaul to Kumar Shahani. But this is her first trip to Cannes and she is excited, proving that talent has no sell-by date.

Auroshikha Dey, who plays one of the five main women in The Shameless, is the new entrant to the brothel. An actor who has done work in independent cinema and television, she says when she first heard the news from her director and producer, she was numb “for a fraction of second and was trying to search for the perfect expression”. “This is a dream come true. I feel ecstatic,” she says. She has already decided what she will wear, couture by Priyanka Raajiv. Her co-star Tanmay Dhanania had written an impassioned post on Instagram on a lack of sponsors for those representing movies being shown at the festival, in contrast with celebrities who have little to do with cinema. He noted, “Talking to cast and crew, everyone seems to be scrounging around to get the money together to go to Cannes. Even with help from pro­duction (who are stretched thin as it is), it is hard to get the cash together….It hurts nonetheless, knowing that people who have nothing to do with the festival, who have no films there, who don’t know what cinema means, let alone indie cinema, will get sponsored to go there, to walk the red carpet, to dress up, prance around, and make reels.” He compared it to sponsoring a circus troupe to go to the Olympics, while leaving the athletes behind. Dhanania says he still hasn’t found a sponsor but he will be going for the premiere.

The festival is also an opportunity for actors to walk the carpet for their cinematic work rather than their brand value. Shahana Goswami, for instance, has done excellent work since 2006 in movies/series such as A Suitable Boy and most recently Zwigato. She will be walking the red carpet for British Indian Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, where she plays a widow who is given her husband’s job in the police. Santosh is in the Un Certain Regard section of the festival. Ditto for Radhika Apte, who will be in Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight, to be screened at the Directors’ Fortnight, who will play Uma, a young woman who is married to a wimpish man in Mumbai and makes the best of living in a slum with little hope and no means.

ADD TO THIS IN RETREAT, directed by Syed Maisam Ali Shah, which tells the story of a man who returns to his hometown after many years. The film is set to be screened under the Association for the Distribution of Independent Cinema Section. There is also the Kannada short film Sunflowers Were the First Ones to Know the only Indian film selected in the La Cinef section of Cannes. The film is among 18 shorts selected from the 2,263 entries submitted by film schools from all over the world. It has been directed by FTII student Chidanand Naik.

There are three other films officially selected at Cannes in various sections from India and South Asia/of Indian origin/ India related. Shedde says, “This is a huge achievement on many levels. For one, the number of films selected is large given the fierce competition at a top festival like Cannes. Two, there are three women directors selected—Payal Kapadia, Sandhya Suri and Mansi Maheshwari’s short Bunnyhood, in Cinefondation. Three, Indians and South Asians are doing unusual international collaborations: Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light is a France-India-Netherlands-Luxembourg co-production. But there’s also Indian writer-director Tushar Prakash, who is co-director with Anna Hints for Sauna Day, an Estonian short in the Semaine de la Critique/ Critics’ Week special screening. Tanveer Hossain of Bangladesh is a producer on Filipino short Arvin Belarmino’s Radikals, in Critics’ Week Competition, in a Philippines-Bang­ladesh-France-US co-production. Next, many of the younger generation of filmmakers have smartly got their strategy sort­ed out in advance: Payal Kapadia is backed by French producer Petit Chaos on board (they had also produced her A Night of Knowing Nothing); the Cannes website already lists her distribu­tor, international press agent and French press agent, before the festival began. That’s really being fully prepared to do business at Cannes in a way that few Indian films manage.”

What’s more, one of the pioneers of the indie movie indus­try in India, cinematographer and director Santosh Sivan will be the first Indian filmmaker to receive the Pierre Angénieux prize for career achievement in cinematography.

It’s not to say that the cinema-less celebrities will not be visible on the red carpet. Their publicists are already breath­less with excitement. We are being told that Kiara Advani will make the country proud at the Women in Cinema Gala dinner, hosted by Vanity Fair. That fashion influencer and wardrobe consultant Kinnari Jain will attend the Cannes Film Festival, where she will “support” Benegal’s Manthan. And that Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Aditi Rao Hydari and Sobhita Dhulipala will also walk the red carpet to the Palais des Festivals (the first two for L’Oreal and the last for an ice cream brand).

Author and filmmaker Bhuvan Lall has been to the Cannes Film Festival almost every year for the past 29 years. He says, “I have watched the Indian filmmaking community in Cannes feeling left out, struggling everywhere, rushing nowhere, barely written about, and occasionally getting some minor limelight in a sidebar. This time there is finally hope that Indian cinema will once again be of consequence as it was from the 1950s to the 1980s in Cannes.” Yet, he points out, India has never won the Palme d’Or, the top prize in Cannes. “One victory at Cannes can change everything, just as Lagaan’s Oscar nom­ination did for mainstream Indian cinema,” he says. Perhaps 2024 and Kapadia will be that change.

For now though, Kani Kusruti, who stars as one of two roommates in All We Imagine as Light as a nurse from Kerala, is concentrating on completing her shoot for a Malayalam movie, packing her bag, and getting ready for her close-up at Cannes.

77th Cannes Film FestivalAll We Imagine as LightcinemaManthanSantoshSister Midnight