India @ Toronto – 5 Films by Anand Patwardhan

By Pickle September 1, 2025

India @ Toronto – 5 Films by Anand Patwardhan

The celebrated documentary filmmaker’s TIFF outings, every one of them with a watershed film, straddle almost the entire span of the festival’s 50 years. Five films by Anand Patwardhan, doyen of the Indian independent documentary movement, have played at TIFF, from the 40-minute film A Time to Rise in 1981 to the 96-minute The World is Family in 2023. A Time to Rise, which was screened at the sixth edition of TIFF, documented the conditions of Chinese and Indian immigrant workers in British Columbia that led to the formation of the Canadian Farmworkers Union. Patwardhan has had at least one film in the TIFF programme in almost every decade since then. He travelled to TIFF in 2018 with Vivek (Reason), a 218-minute documentary that scrutinises the dismantling of democracy in one of the world’s most populous nations.

A Time to Rise (1981); Raam Ke Naam (1992); Father, Son and Holy War (1994); Vivek (Reason, 2018); The World is Family (2023)