A family patriarch is convinced after a night’s dream that his daughter-in-law is the incarnation of the Goddess Kali, in Ray’s quietly devastating attack on religious dogma, with 15-year-old Sharmila Tagore’s haunting gaze at the center of a tug-of-war between blind faith and rationalism.
Dutt’s best-known work is a musical-drama with sweeping character arcs as a struggling poet is outcast and exploited by society, leading him into a downward spiral towards oblivion.
While Ray’s adaptation of his own mystery novel may feel protracted at times, its unhurried nature provides the simple pleasures of a laidback adventure as Feluda the detective must curtail the plans of two bumbling crooks exploiting a hallucinating kid.
One of the most beautifully shot movies ever made, Tarsem Singh’s modern cult classic is an ‘elegiac epic’, an intertwining of two sets of narratives about the endless imagination and despair that the human mind can experience.
Kapadia’s sophomore feature expertly blends realism and poeticism as her filmmaking of sincerity and subtlety brings us into three Indian women’s perspectives and feelings as they contemplate their lives’ paths, which are uncertain yet paradoxically preordained.
Aparna Sen’s first feature is a well-tuned Indian melodrama about the relationships that define and change us as a tender-hearted teacher lends her apartment to an ex-student and her boyfriend.
A donkey becomes both a gift and a nuisance in an Indian village, as this stirring Tamil film makes pointed observations about the irrational anxieties and delusions of the religiously reliant.
A significant work of Malayalam cinema, Aravindan’s work, by turns exuberant and elegiac, about a circus act coming to a rural Indian village teases out the hypnotic and exhibitionistic qualities of performative art in ways that challenge our unquestioned spectatorship.
Featuring finely-tuned performances, this Sundance winner breaks taboos in quietly restrained ways, about an Indian girl in a Himalayan boarding school who discovers love and sex amid a repressive patriarchal order.
The eldest daughter of a poor family is forced to become the breadwinner in Ghatak’s masterful ‘Partition’ melodrama about dreams and sacrifices, infused with some of the densest and most evocative use of Indian classical music in Bengali cinema.
Eternality Tan 