Tusshar Sasi

“The tank is next to me.” “They are shooting at me.” “Come get me. I’m all on my own.” Few films begin with lines this freighted with irrevocability. The Voice of Hind Rajab confronts us with the real voice of a five-year-old girl whose fate is already known, stripping cinema of suspense and replacing it with something far more devastating: certainty. If urgency in the narrative holds it together as a piece of cinema, it is inevitability that makes director Kaouther Ben Hania’s docudrama an impossibly heartbreaking affair. The film is set inside the Palestine Red Crescent Society’s call centre in Ramallah on January 29, 2024. As the war between Israel and Palestine rages on, employees operate in a heightened emotional state, trained to respond to civilian SOS calls amid constant crisis. Omar (Motaz Malhees), Rana (Saja Kilani), Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), and Nisrine (Clara Khoury), the fictional leads, along with the late Hind Rajab’s real voice on a phone call, have guts of steel, but their hearts ache too, as do those of the viewers.

79 years have passed, and it is evident that India and Pakistan still bear the scars of the Partition. While the rare surviving victims and their descendants have somehow learned the quiet dignity of forgiving, a parallel political machinery remains ever-ready to weaponize the tragedy with convenient, revisionist theories. Against this polarized backdrop, Imtiaz Ali arrives with Main Vaapas Aaunga – a remarkably neutral, almost defiantly apolitical look at one of the subcontinent’s defining horrors. It is a film that approaches Partition not as a political failure but as a deeply personal one, choosing to focus on the people who were uprooted, separated, and left waiting for promises that would never be fulfilled.

The landscape of filmmaking has changed. So has the language of horror. Once defined by grand big-screen experiences, some of the most exciting and innovative horror content now emerges on YouTube. A prime example is filmmaker Kane Parsons’s Backrooms, which took the U.S. and horror communities worldwide by storm. Defying the notion that creativity peaks with age, the 20-year-old director’s feature adaptation delivers relentless terror without the backing of a massive budget, proving that atmosphere and imagination can be far more unsettling than scale. Set in 1990, Backrooms follows Clarke (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect who now runs the even more dubious Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a vast furniture store fronted by a pirate mascot with a wooden leg. Seeking therapy, Clarke begins sessions with Mary (Renate Reinsve), who notices patterns in his aggression and gradually grows curious about his mysterious claims. By the film’s third act, she uncovers what Clarke, his colleague Kat, and Kat’s boyfriend Bobby have been through, much of which we have already witnessed through a series of unsettling grainy camera footage. This time, Mary becomes our eyes and ears inside the abyss.

Everything is random, proclaims Abhinav Sunder Nayak in his gutsy second feature, Mollywood Times. It is the story of a brilliant yet salty filmmaker, Vineeth Madhavan (Naslen), who simply can’t catch a break. The reason is never as simplistic as a talented filmmaker threatening the mediocrity around him. Nayak’s narrative tears apart the glossy dream of making it big in the film industry with talent alone. This very idea made me think of a street I walked down in Mumbai a decade ago. It was strangely full of young, glamorous people. They all looked hungry to be discovered in cafes or high-end gyms. “What is this lane?” I asked someone. “You don’t know? This is where all the strugglers live.”

If you grew up in a colony in a village or small town, chances are there was that one household you were asked to stay away from. You aren’t allowed to play with the children over there. The reason is a woman – usually very beautiful – who is believed to be a femme fatale. It’s all fully based on hearsay, and we get colourful stories of the woman’s tantalizing ways, whereas the householder is blissfully unaware. In Suresh Triveni’s Netflix Original film Maa Behen, we get a woman of this kind. Attractive, coquettish, and the object of every man’s fantasy (and every woman’s disdain), Rekha (Madhuri Dixit) is a mom to two firebrand girls, Jaya (Triptii Dimri) and Sushma (Dharna Durga). Together, they headline a wild and supremely entertaining feminist rib-tickler that would force you to exclaim, “Why is this not a series?”

Do you ever think of being correct, but not politically correct? That is, saying something aloud through any medium that might offend the majority despite being right in your stand. Anurag Kashyap’s Bandar spends its entire 2-hour odd runtime walking this dangerously slippery slope. It tells the story of a man wronged in the era of #MeToo, a movement that has rightfully brought justice to a lifetime of denial for countless survivors. The gender reversal makes the story a tad uncomfortable to endorse, though never difficult to empathize with.

Why would anyone name a cat Azaadi? Perhaps every time you call your companion animal by that name, you give voice to an ache to break free. At the heart of the Nepali-language film Shape of Momo is Bishnu’s (Gaumaya Gurung) tabby cat, named exactly that. Aazadi isn’t an animal protagonist so much as a metaphor for the film’s politics of gender. The family rues that they should have liked a tomcat instead because a female cat would keep having litters. While it’s a perfectly practical concern in a domestic setting, Tribeny Rai’s debut feature is also about a generational belief that a family is somehow incomplete without a son.

There’s a scene in The Great Grand Superhero: Aliens Ka Aagman where Jagdish alias Dadaji (Jackie Shroff) narrates what must be a superhero origin story. Dipu (Mihir Godbole), his grandson, is visibly appalled that the tale, however preposterous it may sound, contains no bombs, explosions, or gunfire. Of all things, it has orange candy. How ridiculous is that, asks the sharp kid, staring at his grandfather like a man completely out of touch with the times. The moment is amusing, but it also defines the spirit of Manish Saini’s film. In an era where children’s cinema has almost disappeared from theatres, replaced either by loud spectacle or violent and jingoistic content, The Great Grand Superhero arrives like a relic from another time. And yet, to call it “small” would be inaccurate.