To talk about the 2025 edition of the BIFFES, and more specifically its Indian selection, we first need to be reminded of something obvious in Asia, but that can be a bit lost to the Western gaze. There is no Indian cinema, there are Indian cinemas. The obvious example being, of course, the rivalry between Bollywood and Tollywood, not to mention Telugu cinema or Malayalam films. Even from a purely commercial point of view, the most successful recent Indian director (SS Rajamouli, director or RRR) does not work in Bollywood or Hindi cinema. Bollywood is now longer dominant, but a part of an incredibly productive and vibrant global movie industry, each region having its own production, in its own dialect, with their art house movies, blockbuster movies, stars and respected auteurs. An incredible richness that is, for the moment, barely acknowledged in most parts of Europe and North America. An event like the BIFFES is, for this reason, an important chance to discover a part of the infinite worlds and stories coming from India.
The traditional approach, that could be called, for lack of a better word, the ‘Bollywood model’, is present in this year’s selection. At least two movies, one a blockbuster, the other a Netflix production, stick to the tried formula. Meiyazaghan for example, is an overly long sweet comedy drama (with intermission and songs included) about the strengths of friendship and family. But it’s the movie Amaran, a commercial success in Karnataka, that really fits the current mold. This biography of a fallen military hero is a patriotic war movie, lining up with a lot of the recent public triumphs from all parts of the country. The picture is slick professional, with a caricatural archetypal villain and a noble Indian every man as its hero. Only the presentation of Sai Pallavi, who manages to escape the cliches of its part (the understanding and patient wife) elevates the story with a hint of authenticity or originality.
Those two movies, by their presence, illustrate the status quo of Indian commercial cinema, and therefore underlines the audacity of the other stories presented in the selection. Beline, for example, uses a kind of surrealist imagery to tell a strange tale, that of an old man whose daily TV show is starting to merge with his life, and especially the fate of the housewife of said show, whose husband plunges in a progressive and inexorable spiral of violence toward her. Swaha is a stark, austere black and white drama, which plunges the viewer into the fate of the poorest of the poor in the country, mixing social observations about the treatment of a peasant lost in the city while watching, in parallel, his wife’s descent into loneliness and madness. Level Cross focuses on two strangers stuck in the same desolated station in the middle of nowhere, with a dash of suspense created by the interrogation about the true personality of these characters. Even though the twists are indeed surprising, there is something a bit formulaic about the movie, sticking to a recipe that can recall works of The Coen brothers.
The reliance on classic previsible plots can still be seen in other movies of the selection, like the comedy Vishesham. But other pictures manage to avoid this trap by focusing on a more social, even political, point of view. And in all those cases, the message is loud, clear, as the treatment of women in Indian society seems to trump every other question. Appuram of Beeli Ho, with their descriptions of women facing superstitions, discrimination, are straightforward on this subject. They paint the portrait of a country still troubled by very ancient attitudes, beliefs, all built around a fear of women, of their body, of whatever comes from them. This mix between misogyny and tradition is at the heart of pretty much all the pictures in the festival, depicting in a mostly purely negative light the old customs still in practice in many parts of India.
This tension, between old and new, with important ideological tensions boiling under the surface, finally brings back to the one big question, which is the Indian identity. Everything in the selection, all the questions asked or even hinted at (patriotism, the place of women, religion, family traditions, even the business of beggars in the cities, seen in Magta Jogi as a proper industry) seem to all fuel the same main interrogation, built around the complexity of a country so diverse, so torn between its modernity and its history, that being Indian, finding a precise place in it society, seems to become an adventure in itself. It’s precisely what the winner of the FIPRESCI prize, Humans in the loop, tries to talk about in a very direct manner, but it’s on the mind, consciously or unconsciously, of pretty much every other story told in the festival.
Pierre-Simon Gutman
Edited by Savina Petkova
©FIPRESCI 2025