Panorama
Ghaath (Marathi) – Ambush

Writer-Director: Chhatrapal Ninawe
Country: India
Starring: Jitendra Joshi, Milind Shinde, Janardan Kadam, Dhananjay Mandaokar, Suruchi Adarkar
Producers: Shiladitya Bora, Manish Mundra, Milapsinh Jadeja, Sanyukta Gupta
Co-Producer: Ashok Mahapatra
World Sales: Platoon One Films

Since India’s independence from British colonization,, the tribals of India have been fighting to protect the three central elements of their lives – Land, Water and Jungle. Ghaath is a story told through those elements and corresponding three characters – an undercover Maoist trying to track down a police officer, who is responsible for the death of his brother; a cop trying to secure the surrender of a Maoist guerrilla with the help of an aborigine; and a Maoist besotted by a tribal woman, while on the run from the Maoist cadre. The film is set on the fringes of a Maoist-affected area, shining a light on the tribals caught between conflicting ideologies.

Relying on his images to depict this beleaguered region in central India, Chhatrapal Ninawe transports the audience into an almost hypnotic atmosphere that heightens both the senses and awareness. An unsparing psychological portrait of a protracted and ruthless civil war that continues to rage.

Panorama
And Towards Happy Alleys (Farsi, English)

Director: Sreemoyee Singh
Country: India
Starring: Jafar Panahi, Nasrin Soutodeh, Jinous Nazokkar, Farhad Kheradmand, Aida Mohammadkhani
Producer: Sreemoyee Singh
Executive Producers: Hussain Currimbhoy, Noopur Sinha, Orly Ravid
Sales Contact: Happy Alleys Films

Inspired by the cinema and poetry of Iran a young Indian filmmaker undertakes a self-reflexive journey to explore the lives of filmmakers and women in Tehran. Through intimate and unexpected conversations, the camera captures revelations about how Iranians negotiate life under the Islamic Regime, its constant censorship, and the limitations on basic human expression. Moving and unguarded exchanges with acclaimed Iranian filmmakers Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Shirvani open a door into the lives of women whose daily battles with repression have been the source of their stories. We witness how the Regime dismisses the idea of femininity by erasing a woman’s body, forbidding women to sing, forbidding desire. Over six years, the filmmaker’s camera captures the simmering anxieties, fears, hopes and dreams of a nation on the brink of revolution. Woven within the film’s careful observation and diligent enquiry is the historic journey of Iranian women from mute observers to those fighting to reclaim their lost voices, as they spearhead the largest struggle for liberation rocking Iran now.

And, Towards Happy Alleys is a passionate declaration of love for the cinema and poetry of Iran which also provides a frank view of daily life, and bears witness to a fearless generation raising its voice and implacably demanding its civil liberties.

Generation 14plus
Aatmapamphlet (Marathi)

Director: Ashish Avinash Bende
Country: India
Producers: Bhushan Kumar, Krishan Kumar, Aanand L. Rai, Kanupriya A. Iyer, Madhugandha Kulkarni, Shariq Patel
Starring: Om Bendkhale, Pranjali Shrikant, Chetan Wagh, Manas Tondwalkar, Khushi Hajare
World Sales: Zee Studios

Daydreams, disillusions, and a sudden rush of joy. The symptoms of a first love are everywhere in this delightful directorial debut that reworks the visual codes of Bollywood romances to great comic effect. Yet as Ashish recalls his childhood, and time speeds up or slows down, the story of his love for his classmate Srushti gets caught up in that of 1990s India. Caste and religion threaten to turn friends into foes, but Ashish and his classmates ultimately prove their friendship runs deeper than societal divisions. This plea for (national) unity, voiced by a band of ordinary schoolboys, is in no way naïve: here is a strong rebuttal to the violently divisive walls and barricades of classism and religion tearing the whole world apart; here is popular comedy of the best kind.

Forum Expanded
No Stranger at All (Hindi, Urdu, English)

Director: Priya Sen
Country: India
Producer: Priya Sen

“For two years starting in 2020, this work has been forming along the edges of disquiet and premonition, in fragments and intensities, through wandering and notstaying. It has tried to find language for and ways across the bizarre upheavals of social and political values with the rise of fascism in India and a global pandemic. It has insisted on being amongst the things that keep from falling apart. Filmed in Delhi, these incomplete fictions are of the people, places, and protests that keep the language of hatred at bay and absorb the city’s grief and euphoria. In them are the continuous echoes of a violent and tenuous present. The false closures and tenuous associations in this video/essay compose a timeline of the city at an angle through the time of this work. There is a shadowy sense of a protagonist who undreams it all; a stranger, who it turns out, is no stranger at all.” Priya Sen

Forum Expanded Exhibition
Our Daughters Shall Inherit the Wealth of Our Stories: The Imaginactivism of Yugantar Film Collective

Director: Yugantar
Country: India
Produced by: SAVVY
Contemporary Berlin,
Germany

Our Daughters Shall Inherit the Wealth of Our Stories will manifest spatially in the form of a convivial cinema appreciation, exhibition and discursive space that hosts films and people that resonate with the spirit of the collective alongside a constellation of stories, contextual information and artistic resonances. SAVVY Contemporary welcomes Yugantar’s ecology of vision by accommodating further mediations and entanglements in a programme that extends the duration of the films through other creative productions in performance, literature, theory, as well as in the reality of SAVVY’s neighbourhood and the larger professional community of Berlin. Adding these lively dimensions, the exhibition animates this complex lineage to be a source of new propositions for a collective filmmaking practice that strives towards relations based on equality across different backgrounds and perspectives.

The film collective Yugantar was founded by Deepa Dhanraj, Abha Bhaiya, Navroze Contractor, and Meera Rao in 1980. Between 1980 and 1983, during a time of radical political transformation in India, Yugantar created four pioneering films together with existing or ensuing women’s groups.

Retrospective
Aparajito (Bengali)

Director: Satyajit Ray
Country: India
Starring: Pinaki Sen Gupta, Smaran Ghosal, Kanu Bannerjee, Karuna Bannerjee, Ramani Sen Gupta
Producer: Satyajit Ray
Produced by: Epic Productions

In the 1920s, Apu moved with his family from rural Bengal to Varanasi, where his father finds work as a priest. When the father dies, mother and son move back to their village. The young man resists pressure to become a priest like his father and instead persuades his mother to let him go to school. After graduating, he wins a scholarship to study in Kolkata. Apu works at a printing press at night to pay his expenses and begins to make friends. Meanwhile, left behind back home, his mother grows lonelier and lonelier … Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy was influenced by Italian neo-realism. In this, the second film, he puts his youthful protagonist in direct confrontation with modern-day commodities – automobiles, wristwatches, and printing presses – as well as the bustling street life of a contemporary metropolis and, particularly convincingly, his first encounter with electricity in the form of a lightbulb. It all challenges the young “unvanquished” on a functional level. At the same time, Apu’s individual coming of age and his adaptation to Western culture foreshadow the process of modernisation in Indian society that would culminate in the country’s independence.

Berlinale Series
Dahaad (Hindi) – Roar

Creators: Reema Kagti, Zoya Akhtar
Country: India
Starring: Sonakshi Sinha, Vijay Varma, Gulshan Devaiah, Sohum Shah
Producers: Kassim Jagmagia, Angad Dev Singh, Sunitha Ram
Produced by: Excel Media and Entertainment, Tiger Baby

In rural Rajasthan, women are disappearing but nobody seems to be alarmed. It is not uncommon here for women to elope with their partners when they cannot afford the traditional dowry. However, young policewoman Anjali Bhaati notices a similarity in the cases: long nightly phone calls, a boyfriend whom no one in the neighbourhood has ever seen, and no sign of life after the disappearance. With her motorbike and sunglasses, Anjali might wear the insignia of
traditional macho cops but power and coolness are of no concern to her, rather truth and justice. As a member of a lower caste, obstacles only make her all the more determined: “I’ve had many doors shut in my face. But no one has managed to shut me up.”

In the captivating and subtly humorous Dahaad, Reema Kagti (creator, director) and Zoya Akhtar (creator), who both presented Gully Boy in Berlinale Special in 2019, and Ruchika Oberoi (director) tell the story of a society riven by caste and religion, and a legal system undermined by Hindu nationalism and a patriarchy in which marriage is the only accepted goal in life for women.

Berlinale Series Market
Brown (Hindi)

Director: Abhinay Deo
Country: India
Starring: Karishma Kapoor, Helen, Soni Razdan, Surya Sharma, K.K. Raina
Producer: Zee Studios

Zee Studios’ Brown follows Karishma Kapoor (Rita Brown) as a detective in the Kolkata police force and recovering alcoholic investigating the murder of a young woman from a well-connected family. Directed by Abhinay Deo, the web series is based on the 2016 novel “City of Death” by Abheek Barua, adapted by Digvijay Singh, Sunayana Kumari and Mayukh Ghosh.