Lounge picks 10 films to watch at the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, from classics to arthouse sensations and vampire comedies
27 Oct 2023
Sarvnik Kaur’s documentary continued India’s strong showing in recent years at the Sundance Film Festival in the US—it won World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award: Vérité in January. The film looks at the friendship and opposing world views of Rakesh, a traditional Koli fisherman, and Ganesh, a deep-sea fisher. It’s an intimate, charged film, wonderfully shot by Ashok Meena, clear-eyed about the tough realities of the fishing market. “We knew there was a crisis on the sea,” Kaur told Lounge in an interview in February. “But I wanted to connect my story to the fact that everything that happens on the sea also happens in their personal lives.”
American film-maker Frederick Wiseman is perhaps the most revered documentarian working today. He has made films on libraries and psychiatric wards, long, carefully observed affairs that seem to reveal the soul of the place. His latest subject is La Maison Troisgros, a French restaurant which has held three Michelin stars for over five decades. A runtime of 240 minutes makes this one of the festival’s endurance challenges but Wiseman has rarely left the viewer’s patience unrewarded.
This is likely to be one of the strangest films at this year’s festival. Rainer Sarnet’s The Invisible Fight is the story of a wild rocker who wants to become a monk and learn kung fu. Imagine a surreal martial arts comedy with theology and blasts of Black Sabbath set in the Soviet Union of the 1970s.
Follower explores the issue of radicalisation along linguistic lines. Raghu is an online activist with a Marathi political party, in a region with a Marathi-Kannada divide, who becomes a dangerous internet troll. Harshad Nalawade’s film premiered at the 2023 International Film Festival of Rotterdam, as part of an India-focused section, “The Shape of Things to Come?”.
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