I spent a number of years living in France, and one of the most interesting words I learned was “sosie” – someone who perfectly resembles someone else, to the point that people could confuse them. I was familiar with impersonators, mostly comedians who did voice imitations of famous people, whether…
Leave a CommentCategory: London Indian Film Festival
This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on May 25, 2016. Pari (Hetal Gada), 10, and her younger brother, Chotu (Krrish Chhabria), 8, live with their aunt and uncle after their parents were killed in an accident. Chotu is blind – though we discover as the film unpeels itself that…
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This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on July 26, 2016. If I were asked about the one sound in the world I love, hands down the answer would be the whirring of a film projector. In this day and age, when digital is king, I still remember the joys…
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This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on August 1, 2016. Award-winning Malayalam director Jayaraj turned to an Anton Chekov short story, “Vanka”, to find the inspiration for his most recent film Ottaal (“The Trap”), proof that some themes transcend place and time. Eight-year-old Kuttappai (Ashanth K. Sha), orphaned after the…
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This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on September 26, 2016. With Island City, director Ruchika Oberoi presents a tryptich of stories dealing with oppression and alienation in the modern island city of the title, Mumbai. In the first story, “Fun Committee”, Vinay Pathak is perfect as Suyash Chaturvedi, the…
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This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on September 21, 2016. When Vibhavari (Sugandha Garg), an up-and-coming Bollywood music director, finds herself facing a creative block, she sets off for Punjab to meet and record folk singer Bibi Swaroop (Sadhana Singh). She first meets Bibi’s son, Mastana (Siddhant Behl), a…
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This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on September 26, 2016. There is a bittersweet bit of irony at play in the fact that Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy’s Academy-award winning short documentary film A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness is on the schedule at LIFF2016. I watched it the same…
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This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on September 30, 2016. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s documentary feature Song of Lahore is about honour of a different kind than that of her award-winning A Girl in the River. Lahore has been a major South Asian cultural centre for well over a thousand years.…
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This post first appeared on Totally Filmy on August 14, 2018. In the village of Bajjar, Uttar Pradesh, not far from Agra where the Taj Mahal sits in splendour and attracts millions of visitors (both from India and abroad) every year, Bansi (Subrat Dutta), an illiterate man, decides to hatch…
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