The 2024 MAMI Mumbai Film Festival (October 19-24) was a notably more low-key affair than years past. Without a title sponsor in Jio, organisers had to shorten this year’s edition to six days and limit the number of venues and screenings, putting a bit of a damper on the plans of cinephiles travelling to Mumbai from all over India. The disappointment surrounding a truncated festival could best be felt in the long walk-in queues outside the two venues. While the stately Regal Cinema seems more tailor-made for a festival attracting such large crowds, the multiple screens at PVR Juhu made it a more convenient second home for six days. If there was a silver lining to MAMI cutting down the venues to two, it was we were mercifully spared from commuting in the October heat.
Festivalgoers, however, weren’t too happy to learn that an already slim programme had more fat cut off when two documentaries were pulled from programming at the last minute. One was the Berlinale-crowned No Other Land, a chronicle of Israel’s campaign of violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. The other, Russians at War, concerned Russian soldiers on the front line wrestling with the purpose of the Ukraine War. A statement shared by the festival simply stated the screenings were cancelled due to not receiving the “required permissions”. Extra-filmic factors notwithstanding, MAMI-lite still offered enthusiasts, young and old, plenty to see. The line-up may have been light on high-profile auteurs. That said, the emphasis on new voices and fresh perspectives was stronger. And it allowed the films to speak for themselves.
When the organisers came together to pick the opening film, the choice must have been a no-brainer. Payal Kapadia’s Cannes-championed All We Imagine as Light is a luminous ode to Mumbai and all the migrants who make up the metropolis. “This city takes time away from you.” So remarks the disembodied voice of a migrant, one of many offering testimonies about making Mumbai their home away from home in the opening sequence. Watching the neighbourhoods drift past from a local train is Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a Malayali nurse whose life remains stuck in stasis. Shortly after getting married, Prabha’s husband left to Germany for work, leaving her behind. The calls too dried up over time. So, she devotes all her time looking out for others, making their problems her own. Her flatmate, the young Anu (Divya Prabha), has been sneaking around with a Muslim boy (Hridu Haroon) while her parents have been looking for suitors back home in Kerala. Meanwhile, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a widowed cook who works at the same hospital as Prabha and Anu, is being forced out of her home of 20 years by heartless property builders. The film lends a poetic dignity to the silent despair of three generations of women circumscribed by personal struggles and societal norms. When the three head down to the coastal town of Ratnagiri, the trip turns dreamlike, allowing each to realise their respective desires.
There is not a false moment as we watch Prabha, Anu and Parvaty find the light from within and the ties that bind. As Kapadia looks to give back the time Mumbai has robbed from its migrant workers, she graciously articulates their desire to escape a holding pattern of displacement-induced alienation. The personal and the political, the sublime and the mundane, the past and the present intertwine in a sobering document of urban life. If the 2021 hybrid doc A Night of Knowing Nothing didn’t confirm Kapadia as the real deal, All We Imagine as Light very well should. If it was the first Indian film in 30 years to compete for the Palme d’Or, it’s because it’s the kind of film that can deservedly get elevated to greatness amid the heightened passions and raised stakes of an international film festival.
Another festival-fêted standout, also starring Kusruti, was Shuchi Talati’s debut feature Girls will be Girls, a mother-and-daughter coming-of-age symphony of charged silences, withering stares and stolen moments. Newcomer Preeti Panigrahi brings an instinctive grasp to Mira, the star student of a strict boarding school carefully traversing the biochemical tizzy of first love. Kusruti lends her searching eyes as the mom torn between discipling her daughter and competing with her for the same young man’s attention. If “boys will be boys” has turned into an excuse for behaviour that demands an apology, Talati’s title serves as an assertion of female desire, a subject that tends to stoke moral panic in repressed cultures. After claiming the Audience Award in the World Cinema Dramatic category at Sundance, the film earned more accolades at MAMI, including the NETPAC and Gender Sensitivity awards.
Within the festival’s tight international purview, no title inspired more fervent hurrahs and whistles than the ones that had Cannes graffitied on their posters. In a world wired and rewired by social media, rarely can we go into a film without some advance word on it or hype mushrooming around it. Powered by those very metrics, Coralie Fargeat’s gross-out extravaganza The Substance proved to be one of the festival’s hottest tickets. The French filmmaker moves her goal past further into the heart of Hollywood and American Consumerism for a more pointed attack on the misogynistic beauty standards that label a best-used by date on women. Demi Moore plays a fading star who injects herself with a mysterious black-market drug to create a younger version of herself. Played by Margaret Qualley, the younger version starts to rob more and more time away from the older as her star rises. The escalating conflict caps off in a gleefully unhinged ending that had the entire audience exclaiming a collective WTF.
Not as gory yet more harrowing, April presents an exercise in body horror that is full of muted anger. Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s second feature is about Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), a skilled ob-gyn moonlighting as an illegal abortionist. While under investigation for the death of a baby she helped deliver, Nina continues to operate on desperate women in small villages nearby. Because if she won’t, someone else will. Kulumbegashvili refrains from dramatizing the story or heroizing Nina or romanticising her courage. Birth and abortion, life and death are framed as mere biological events. There is a surgical precision to her approach that echoes that of her protagonist. Nina’s journey through darkness, as internal as external, unfolds at a slow simmer with a sense of foreboding that lingers without a blowout.
In Misericordia, Alain Guiraudie invests a dark game of desires with endless farcical twists, a tonal juggling act he pulls off handsomely. Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to the village where he grew up as a teen. But his arrival disturbs the precarious balance within its tiny community, setting off a chain of unexpected events. Between childhood friends and a naughty priest, things get tense. Just when they do, Guiraudie somehow always manages to catch that laugh in the back of our throats. If Misercordia injected a vital burst of energy to a rather drowsy second half of the festival, the Palme d’Or winner Anora helped wrap things up on a high note. The films of Sean Baker give sex workers, hustlers and strivers a dignity that mainstream Hollywood does not. Not without some degree of judgement. In his latest, a riotous anti-Cinderella tale, Mikey Madison dazzles in the role a strong-willed Brooklyn stripper whose Vegas marriage to the spoilt son of a Russian oligarch doesn’t quite pan out as she imagines. It is a film about the class divide, the performance of labour and the labour of performance, and how money can change the power dynamics of a relationship.
Following the departure of Anupama Chopra, MAMI welcomed a new interim festival director, noted filmmaker and archivist Shivendra Singh Dungarpur. For festivalgoers keen on catching restored classics, Dungarpur’s arrival sounded like an encouraging development. But again, the constraints this year meant only four films were screened in the category: Girish Kasaravalli’s Ghatashraddha (1977), Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams (1982), Nirad Mohapatra’s Maya Miriga (1984), and Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow’s Camp de Thiaroye (1988). The thrill of sitting down to watch a beloved classic for the first time on the big screen remains one of the great privileges of any film festival experience.
It could take a year or two to grasp a sense of the direction in which Dungarpur and whoever succeeds him will take MAMI. There always remains scope to shake things up for the better. Meeting fellow film lovers on such annual pilgrimages can strike confidence in a country’s cinema culture, especially when the fog of uncertainty about cinema as a medium, a venue and a celebration only seems to thicken every year. With so much trash suffocating our theatres all around the year, we need festivals like MAMI more than ever to give the smaller, braver films from around India and the world oxygen.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bengaluru.
