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Movies speak to me. The phenomenological experience of entering the intimate world of characters and listening to their personal dilemma and the ‘choices’ they make, interests me. It is the closest one can get to the human experience as it is lived, felt and understood. Each experience leaves me a little more humbled, a little closer to life and a lot more reflective. This predilection attracts me to MAMI, the International Film Festival held in Mumbai every year. I have religiously watched the oeuvre every year since its inception in 1997.
This year, MAMI was smaller in scale as Anupama Chopra, the former Director, had stepped down and the Jio sponsorship had ended in 2023. Calling it ‘a period of transition’, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, filmmaker and archivist who took over the mantle as the Interim Festival Director, revamped and rebooted the festival amid severe budget constraints. “It was very clear in my head that we had to move ahead, make it the People’s Festival—more personal, interactive and accessible to all and at focused locations. We wanted to support independent cinema, regional cinema and inspire young directors. I wanted MAMI to become a festival for the world and not just for Mumbaikars.”
Consequently, instead of scattered venues, the festival was confined to two compact locations by choice, over six days—Regal Cinema, a single screen Art-deco movie theatre located at Colaba Causeway; and three-four screens at PVR Juhu. Regal worked for me quite well as the vicinity was conducive to grabbing coffee at nearby cafes and interacting with fellow delegates during the one-hour breaks.
How does one decide what to watch? Well, browsing the festival catalogue, given to each delegate, is the starting point of the MAMI experience. It contains blurbs on all the movies, the directors, recognition at international circuits, etc. It also classifies movies into horizontal bands. This year, it was Focus on South Asia with 21 movies from South Asia and from the diasporas—powerful voices demanding new ways of seeing and being; the Dimensions Mumbai that showcased Mumbai stories by young directors; Large Short Films that spanned 10-20 minutes; the Gala Premiers, and MAMI Tribute to Kumar Shahani, the filmmaker, theorist and teacher. One can select movies from this classification or look at the thematic grouping that cuts across these categories and is rightly labelled ‘Strands’, i.e. common threads that bunch movies around emergent themes. For this year, the strands were: ‘Female Gaze’—the ferociously feminist work by women; ‘Coming of Age’ about loss of innocence and growing up; ‘It’s Complicated’ about modern relationships and coupling; ‘Modern Anxieties’ about social media, surveillance culture and geopolitical conflict; ‘Queering Gender’ had narratives about fluidity of gender; ‘Rendezvous with French Cinema’ about contemporary French cinema; ‘Facing the End’ about death and dying; and ‘Between Worlds’ about movies that were dreamy and surreal. The festival opened with Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light for invited audiences and closed with Anora by Sean Baker for festival attendees.
I am interested in world cinema because outside the festival, these movies are hard to access in India; and I would miss my window to understand the current concerns of the world. Eventually, I managed to watch about 18-19 movies during the six days and missed several others.
Today, as I reflect on the movies I watched, a prominent theme emerges. Serendipitously, all movies coalesce into a common theme: Mankind’s perennial quest for ‘identity’, of ‘who I really am’ in terms of various identity labels that one is born with or consciously morphs into, i.e. ‘fitting in’ verses ‘belonging’. Anu Rangachar, the curator for the international section, spoke about proactively inviting young directors she met at festival circuits who had a refreshing perspective on “hetero-normativity, societal civility and gendered expectations”.
My selection for Founding Fuel readers includes avant-garde movies (with some spoilers) that redefine the pursuit of identity.
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
Norway I 2024 I104’ I Danish, English, Norwegian I Documentary
It is indeed a ‘remarkable’ and authentic film by Benjamin Ree in the genre of documentaries that conventionally relies on interactions between individuals who are co-located. Rees ventures into online digital ethnographic documentation as a valid record of offline reality. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin captures the short life of Mats Steen, a Norwegian youth who died in 2014 at the age of 25 due to Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. Mats is deprived a normal childhood; he cannot walk or play with friends and as the disease progresses, he is confined to his room on wheelchair with a computer for company. The parents, Robert and Trude, are affectionate, caring and want their son to experience simple joys of friendship and love, rather than gaming on the computer. For the first part, Ree uses actual footage from family photographs and videos and the voice-over of the parents to build Mats’ life from infancy to his final days. Thereafter, Rees turns to digital records. After Mats’ demise, the parents find the computer password intentionally left for them. As they post the obituary, they are dumbfounded by the flood of condolence messages and loving tributes from an ‘invisible community of friends’ from the gaming site, World of Warcraft, where Mats is ‘Ibelin’. Mats’ online identity is a friendly, robust, heavy built grown up man (opposite of his real physical self) who has been counselling other virtual friend like Xenia, a Danish mother who cannot connect with her autistic son; Lisette, a woman Ibelin befriended as a teenager and who becomes his ‘significant other’; and another friend, Starlight, who has saved 42,000 logs of conversation during gaming.
Most parents today are weary of internet addiction among youth but, in his avatar as Ibelin, Mats vicariously experienced a far richer life, found inner peace in true friendship and love, much beyond what his parents hoped for him. For the funeral, these virtual friends are physically present like a family.
Ree crafts the digital life of Mats as Ibelin that Mats calls “an expansion of myself”, not a distraction or an escape from reality. He builds the narrative from the site’s archives; gets animators to reconstruct Mats’ persona inside the game and makes it into an authentic documentary. The merging of the physical and the virtual identity is a departure from the conventions of the documentary genre. Ethnographic researcher Jeffrey Lane validates the process: “Divergent performances in online and offline reflect a continuous identity performed differently in different contexts.” The wheelchair-bound identity of Mats finds ascension in the virtual identity as Ibelin. It is a cathartic closure for the parents and a form defying move for Ree.
Emilia Perez
France I 2024 I 130’ I Spanish I Fiction
A film by French director Jacques Audiard, Emilia Perez deals with a different kind of border crossing by a Mexican drug cartel boss—the border of gender, a ‘trespass’ into a feminine identity; a ‘second chance’ to evolve from brutal and ruthless power to the subtle forces of tenderness, atonement and care.
The movie opens with a TV screen of women protesting against femicide, marginalisation, poverty and corruption in Latin America. The movie focuses on four women protagonists (played by Latin American actors, one of them a Trans) to tackle collective pursuit of emancipation, identity, ‘space’ and personal agency. Audiard chooses stylized dance and musical numbers from opera to add comic sequences. They function as Chorus to comment and to leap the narrative in opera style. Audiard’s casting ensures all the actors can sing and dance for the musical interludes.
Keen to delete his violent past and find authentic self, Manitas Del Monte, a powerful, dreaded cartel lord notices Rita (played by Zoe Saldana), a frustrated lawyer stuck in a futile job that cannot serve justice. Her cases involve whitewashing high-profile murder trials of guilty defendants who are always let off. To coerce Rita to work on a secret assignment, Manitas gets her kidnapped and makes a Faustian offer of $2 million she cannot refuse: Rita must ensure logistics to relocate his wife Jessi (played by Selena Gomez) and two children to a safe haven in Switzerland; forge his death without leaving a trail; and find the best doctors in the world for a gender-affirming surgery at any cost. Next, in an operatic style, in Bangkok, Rita is negotiating with a trans-phobic doctor for million biological interventions from mammoplasty, vaginoplasty, rhinoplasty and the works, except:
Doctor: You cannot change the soul
Rita: Changing the body changes the soul. Changing the soul changes society
The film uses this as a trope for Manitas’ redemption.
We see Manitas trans-ing into the elegant lady, Emilia Perez—a riveting performance by Karla Sofia Gascon, a Spanish trans-actress, who plays both Manitas and Emilia using her own trans-experience and ventriloquist timbre. Emilia revels in the new avatar till memory of Manitas’ past crimes and the blood of thousands of deaths begin to haunt her soul. To atone, she founds La Lucecita, a philanthropic organisation for grieving families in search of ‘missing’ relatives. One such client happens to be Epifania (Adrian Paz) suffering from deep pain and fear of violence. Emilia finds herself drawn to her—the residual ‘male’ desire surfaces in the new body.
Next, Emilia begins to yearn for her family and turns to Rita once again to bring her children and wife back to Mexico to live with her as their Aunt Emilia, Manitas’ out-of- touch cousin. In Mexican households, mothers play the ‘father’ and we see Emilia enjoying the kids and playing with them; the joy of ‘mothering’ is a new experience. The kids are overjoyed too as they ‘smell’ their father in Aunt Emilia. In the meantime, Jessi loves her new-found freedom and gets attracted to another man and Emilia not only understands (she is a woman now) but encourages Jessi.
Emilia Perez is a movie about women yearning for freedom, love and identity. Through Emilia, the other characters realize their authentic self: Jessi finds a second chance at love; Rita finds meaning in her circular career as she is able to help other women actualize their dreams; and Epifania finds solace in her grief and ‘freedom to be free as air’. Emilia Perez, the tour de force, is loved by the director, the camera and the audience for her brilliant performance as a trans. As for Emilia, the chance of living both genders makes her realise how much she has changed during transition and what remains unchanged in her journey from a cartel leader to a philanthropist. Certainly, the experience has enabled her to inspire consequential change in society.
In an interview, Audiard explains: ‘The heartbeat of the film, its raison d’etre is: live life authentically.”
At Cannes this year, the film won the Jury prize and the Best Actress Award to the ensemble cast of Karla Sofia Gascon, Zoe Saldana, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Ireland, United Kingdom, Zambia I 2024 I 99’ I Bemba, English I Fiction
This is a film led by a fierce woman director, Rungano Nyoni. The catalogue mentions it as a movie ‘redefining Female Gaze’ of the narrator, “portraying… subjects as dynamic forces navigating the world often shaped against them… (it is an) unapologetically feminine narrative that is both universal and personal”.
This is Zambia on an open road at night. Shula (Susan Chardy), wearing an inflated black body-suit, reminiscent of Missy Elliott’s costume in the music video Rain (the song is about being ‘toyed with’) and a black star-spangled head gear (coming from a costume party?), is driving an SUV with blaring music. The headlights catch a motionless form on the road; there is no road diversion so Shula alights and nonchalantly walks towards the body. It is her Uncle Fred, her mother’s brother, and he is dead. She calls her inebriated father who asks for money for the cab yet does not turn up. Shula waits in the car till her crazy sister Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) joins her and starts blabbering about the deceased uncle: “he must have died a happy man” at the hands of sex workers from the nearby brothel, who flung him on the road to die. This scene sets the context for the movie.
Shula is hit by the realisation that Uncle Fred not only sexually assaulted her in childhood but also her sister Nsansa, cousin Bhupe (she has a video of the abuse) and countless other women across generations. At home, Shula will have to confront the couch where abuse occurred. Dozens of relatives descend on the poor household to join in the ritual of cooking large meals, stitching red funeral clothes, wailing in chorus and crawling into the room on their knees to sleep as a commune.
This is a household of collective amnesia of intergenerational and intra-familial child sexual abuse. In Zambian’s indigenous culture, the phrase ‘Uthango ludla Amakhome’ i.e. home as a place of ‘secrecy’, is prevalent. It makes mothers bystanders and perpetrators of sexual abuse of their girls as an existential choice. When the cultural norms of a society normalise abusive behaviour, it becomes domesticated and preoccupation with ritual, a coping mechanism.
Shula remembers a TV show about guinea fowls who squawk in unison to warn of approaching predators. Before departure, Shula burns the house down and releases the guinea fowl cage to the wailing sound of women, like the bird call. The conspiracy of silence is broken—It is the ‘birth of a new guinea fowl’.
A Different Man
USA I 2024 I 112’ I English I Fiction
At a corporate office in New York, a training video on anti-discrimination is being filmed near the water cooler. The actor in the video is actually afflicted with severe neurofibromatosis that manifests in facial tumours and affected speech. The employees are being sensitised on diversity and inclusive behaviour, the unconscious non-verbal or verbal body shaming of ‘different’ people. During the shoot, there is a fainting spell and the employees turn condescending towards the actor. Bias lurks in the workplace and in society.
The actor in the video is Edward Lemuel (Sebastian Stan in prosthetics), a struggling actor who faces revulsion every single day. Trapped in an identity he hates, Edward desires social ‘invisibility’ as a coping mechanism and yet he wants to succeed in a profession that visiblises. When pretty Ingrid Vold (Renate Reinsve), a budding playwright, comes to live next door and talks to him with natural affinity, the glum Edward sees a chance for romance. Convinced that ‘beauty is skin deep’, he signs up for an experimental medical treatment to sever his old identity. Voila, the tumours peel off and Edward turns into a handsome man with a new identity as Guy Moratz (Sebastian Stan without the prosthetics), ready to experience the world like a regular guy. He becomes a successful real estate agent, desired by Ingrid, who castes him as a lead in an Off-Broadway play based on Edward’s life, without any inkling that he might be the same fellow.
During the rehearsals, Oswald, another man suffering from neurofibromatosis (Adam Pearson with disfigurement in real life) walks in and takes interest in the theme of the play. Oswald’s sunny disposition, charm, self-assurance and grasp of the nuances about the characterisation impress Ingrid and everyone else except Guy. When his performance slips, Oswald replaces Guy in the play and in Ingrid’s life. The play is a great success. Ingrid eventually marries Oswald and the creative couple plans a movie on the play.
Years later, Guy runs into Oswald and Ingrid at a restaurant, fumbles with the order and Oswald quips: ‘You have not changed a bit.’
The movie shows (not tells) two similar cases of horribly disfigured ‘different’ people. Both face the same bias-prone social system yet make different choices: Oswald de-stigmatises his looks and focuses on inner beauty while Edward attempts to normalise his external looks without understanding the basic principle: disfigurement is not a single entity nor is the bias uniform. Through this “darkly hilarious twist on Kafka” the movie shows that “tools of self-actualisation do little to heal the soul”.
The Substance
France, United Kingdom, USA I 2024 I 140’ I English I Fiction
A feminine spin to A Different Man, the body-horror movie The Substance narrates the compulsive ‘choice’ the female protagonist in show biz makes. All women are subjected to a clearly reinforced communication about the toxic patriarchal norms of the ‘male gaze’ that determine the beauty standards and shelf-life of women, rendering them obsessively complicit.
Producer, Director and Screenwriter Coralie Fargeat who won the Best Screenplay award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival for this movie, has crafted the narrative on her own obsessions with looks and appearances as a kid and subsequently on the other side of 40. She is non-judgmental of women chasing eternal youth and searching for ways to be loved. The choice is existential. Fargeat acknowledges that a lot is changing in society and it will need more time before things really change for women to embrace self-love and self-acceptance. Her dramatic story might accelerate it.
The opening shot shows an egg yolk on the screen, a syringe injecting a serum into the yolk, resulting in cell-replication; the egg clones into two—a metaphor that builds the narrative.
The Hollywood actress Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) runs a fitness show. The audience loves her and the industry serenades her by etching a star in her name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. On her 50th birthday, Elizabeth is ruthlessly dismissed from the show by Harvey (Dennis Quaid in Dolce & Gabbana suits), the producer who believes 50 is the expiry date. Elizabeth’s posters are ripped from the billboards and the tile with the star loses shine. Devastated but desperate to cling to eternal youth, Elizabeth seeks the grey market to procure cell replicating ‘Substance’: “With The Substance, you can generate another you: younger, more beautiful and more perfect. You just have to share time—one week for one, one week for the other; a perfect balance of seven days each. If you respect the balance... what could possibly go wrong?”
Elizabeth is directed to a shady area to access box 503 to pick up the kit, goes to her bathroom and injects the serum. The wreathing pain splits her back and a stunning, sexy young woman Sue (Margaret Qualley) emerges. Each of the clones gets seven days while the other body lies comatose on the bathroom floor. Both share a single consciousness. Sue auditions for Elizabeth’s role and becomes the next sensation of Harvey and the billboards splash her pictures. Next week the switch happens and Elizabeth goes out while Sue becomes comatose. Elizabeth runs into a former High School friend, who still finds her beautiful; they agree to meet; Elizabeth puts on extra make-up, smears it off, re-applies it; in a poignant scene she stares at her aging face in the mirror and cancels the date. A chance at finding true love is lost.
What follows next is inevitable: Elizabeth and Sue become jealous of each other; Sue sabotages the procedure by exceeding her seven-day deadline for a coveted New Year programme; the ‘substance’ is abused. In a final morbid scene Elizabeth lies deprived of nutrition and grows into a grotesque old hag, a monster. A fight ensues between the two and Elizabeth is annihilated. What happens to one body happens to the other also. During Sue’s performance on New Year eve, Elizabeth’s monster form erupts out her body on the stage. Blood, muscles and puke are unleashed on audience and with it the spell of beauty. The scene closes on the star tile cracking.
There are not many dialogues. The power of the movie lies in symbols (the white bathroom, orange corridor, yellow jacket, the mirror, and the star tile and the sound effects) and gross visuals of body interiors. The message is delivered brutally but unequivocally: It is the women themselves—not market, not show biz, nor men. The better version of the ‘self’ is internal ‘substance’, not skin deep.
The movie received 11 minutes of clapping at Cannes. Those who had felt repulsed must have left the auditorium.
Let me mention some other movies which also deserve a detailed analysis but for want of space, I will just touch upon them to incorporate different ways of pursuing identity.
The Room Next Door
Spain I 2024 I 107’ I English I Fiction
This is a Pedro Almodovar film based on Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through. Martha (Tilda Swinton), a war correspondent, has seen violent but heroic deaths in the war zone, is dying of cervical cancer, and wants to plan self-euthanasia by procuring a ‘pill’. Her old-time friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a famous writer, visits her in hospital and is inducted into a plan. Martha wants to decide the manner of dying, not on a hospital bed. They go to a rented house in upstate New York with restful natural surroundings, discuss philosophy and literary works of Faulkner, Hemingway and James Joyce, walk in nature, lie by the poolside, wear designer clothes and talk about death—the exit that defines a worthwhile life. One morning, in ‘the room next door’ to Ingrid, Martha is gone. The movie reminds me of Emily Dickenson’s poem ‘Because I could not stop for Death, it kindly stopped for me’. By choosing the manner of dying before death decides, Martha overleaps this world—it is a coming together of dismembered memory of the soldiers bravely dying on the battlefield and the one who reported it with equal valour—the final act of transcendence and reconciliation into a world beyond is pure poetry.
Little Jaffna
France I 2024 I 97’ I French-Tamil I Fiction
La Chappel aka ‘Little Jaffna’ in Paris is home to the Tamil community, displaced by ethnic strife in Sri Lanka. Michael Beaulieu is a police officer in Paris, Tamil by birth. He is sent undercover to decimate a gang that illegally funds separatist, Liberal Tigers in Sri Lanka. Like the Thomas Beckett syndrome, if you live long enough with the opponent, you get emotionally invested in their plight and a part of you begins to relate to their cause. Michael is assailed by the dilemma of ‘who he really is’: between opposite forces of Tamil heritage and French upbringing; undercover duality; and diasporic and private/cultural/historical self. Is it a hyphenated or is it a binary identity without having to choose one over the other? It certainly is a valid pursuit.
This is a movie by Lawrence Valin, of Valin, and enacted by Valin. Shot over seven years in troubled northern Sri Lanka, Valin made this film fearful that it could be his last. In spite of the dangers, he wanted the untold story of Tamil rebels to be told authentically for the world to see. Little Jaffna has an identity too.
April
Georgia, France, Italy I 2024 I 134’ I Georgian I Fiction
Dea Kulumbegashvili, the Georgian director and writer of the movie April intimately knows her subject: the religious rural communities in Georgia, the erstwhile Soviet nation; the Georgian language; and the plight of rural women whose lives, rights and bodies are at the mercy of patriarchy and the Orthodox Church. Girls are married before the age of consent. They have no agency over their reproductive rights. In Georgia, abortion may be legal but in reality it is not, it is discretion.
The opening shot shows children at play and an ominous creature hovering around.
The scene shifts to a hospital and the audience is made to watch the anatomy, the bloody reality, the frontal view of vagina in labour. The female body is the subject and the source of horror. It is a still birth; the young woman looks tired but somewhat relieved. She is from the Director’s home town Lagodeshi (the director spent months studying the elemental plight of rural women patients and medical staff at the hospital; the shots are actual hospital scenes). The father complains of medical negligence against the obstetrician Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) and accuses her of moonlighting as an illegal abortionist. During the inquiry Nina is questioned about illegal abortions:
Doctor: Aren’t you afraid that someday, you will be caught.
Nina: No one wants to do it… somebody has to…. the pregnancy has to be a secret… how can I deny them?
Doctor: Aren’t you afraid?
Nina: Other than the job… I have nothing to lose.
The movie subsequently follows Nina driving through the beautiful Georgian countryside, she attends to a pregnant mute girl on the kitchen table, and dispenses contraceptive pills even though hospitals are supposed to keep the stock but they do not. Nina stoically works around rules and is a hero in the eyes of the women. It may not be a great life but it is one she has chosen, on her own terms.
The movie won a special Jury award at the 81st Venice International Film Festival.
Before I sign off, a word about Happyend and the closing film Anora.
Happyend
Japan, USA I 2024 I 113’ I Japanese I Fiction
The movie is located in a high school in Japan in the near future. It is about two boys who play pranks, incur the wrath of the principal who uses high tech surveillance. A camera follows the students on the campus digitally framing the erring individuals, the algorithm decides the quantum of punishment by deducting marks; and the message is uploaded on the internet. The boys handle the principal, get admission in professional colleges, and come to terms with broken friendships. It is a coming-of-age film.
Anora
USA I 2024 I 138’ I English, Russian I Fiction
The movie won the 2024 Palme d’Or award. The movie is Pretty Woman with a twist. Instead of the gorgeous Richard Gere and Julia Roberts and the fairytale ending, Anora features a spoilt brat Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) studying in the US, son of wealthy Russian oligarchs and a feisty Russian-speaking Brooklyn hooker Anora (Mickey Madison). The two get married in Vegas. When the parents come to know, they use money power, law and physical force to get the marriage annulled. It is a hilarious chase. Race and Class are a permanent identity.
‘It’s Complicated’
The experience and how it is experienced are two different things.
How do I sum up the experience of watching the wonderful smorgasbord of international cinema? I feel ‘shaken and stirred’. The process of writing has certainly been cathartic. I got to experience some of the best films released in 2024, some even before their release in theatres. That is a joy difficult to match. Au revoir.
