Cannes 2025: India has a diverse slate

Gulf Today

17-05-2025

After the unprecedented high of 2024, the ongoing 78th Cannes Film Festival might feel like a bit of a dampener for India. The world's largest film-producing nation has no entry in the festival's main Competition this year.
Its presence is, however, strong enough in terms of both films and personalities not to be dismissed as insignificant. From a restored print of a Satyajit Ray classic to a short film by an African student of a Kolkata film school named after the maestro, India has much on show at Cannes 2025.
Payal Kapadia, who made history last year by winning the Grand Prix for her delectable debut narrative feature All We Imagine as Light, is a Competition juror this year.
A Doll Made Up of Clay
Kapadia is the seventh Indian woman and only the second South Asian female director to be a Cannes main Competition jury member after Mira Nair (1990), Arundhati Roy (2000), Aishwarya Rai (2003), Nandita Das (2005), Sharmila Tagore (2009) and Vidya Balan (2013). The 2025 Cannes jury, presided over by legendary French actress Juliette Binoche, includes actresses Halle Berry and Alba Rohrwacher, French-Moroccan writer Leila Slimani, filmmakers Hong Sangsoo, Carlos Reygadas and Dieudo Hamadi, and actor Jeremy Strong. India has a film in the festival's official selection — Neeraj Ghaywan's sophomore Homebound, starring Ishaan Khatter, Janhvi Kapoor and Vishal Jethwa.
The Hindi film, produced, among others, by Karan Johar, is part of the festival's sidebar Un certain regard, a section that programs noteworthy films by directors endowed with distinctive cinematic voices. Ghaywan returns to Cannes a decade after his first film, Masaan, bagged a couple of Un certain regard prizes. Although he has not been particularly prolific, he has quickly established himself in the forefront of a new crop of Indian directors with a global standing. Homebound is about two friends from a north Indian village who, in search of dignity, pursue police jobs but their bonding is put under severe strain as their desperation mounts.
A Doll Made Up of Clay
India also has an official entry in La Cinef, a section introduced in Cannes to showcase the work of film school students. The 24-minute film, A Doll Made Up of Clay, is directed by Kokob Gebrehaweria Tesfay, an Ethiopian alumnus of Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI), Kolkata. A Doll Made Up of Clay is about a young Nigerian man who sells his father's land and heads to India to play football. A serious injury stymies his dreams of making a career in the game. In order to heal from the setback, he takes recourse to the rituals of his ancestors. Elsewhere in the festival, two promising Indian directors, Nainital resident Diwa Shah and Sikkim's Tribeny Rai, are making emphatic and exciting early career moves.
Diwa Shah, at the end of a four-and-a-half-month Cannes Film Festival-backed residency in Paris to work on the screenplay of her second feature, Kyab (Refuge), has won a writing grant from CNC, the French national centre for cinema and the moving image. In Kyab, Shah, who won the San Sebastian Film Festival's Kruxtabank New Directors Award in 2024 for her first film Bahadur — The Brave, turns her lens on the plight of third-generation Tibetan refugees in India. Tribeny Rai, an alumna of the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, is part of 'HAF Goes to Cannes'. The Hong Kong Asian Film Financing Forum (HAF) selection gives her a platform at the world's premiere film market to pitch her debut project, Shape of Momo, a work-in-progress Indo-Nepalese venture.
Aranyer Din Ratri
Rai's film centres on a woman who quits her job and returns to her family beset by the death of several male members. It focuses on women seeking to assert their autonomy and freedom in a hidebound patriarchal society. The Indian spectrum in Cannes this year is completed by a Cannes Classics selection of Satyajit Ray's 1970 film Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest). The film has been restored with the support of the Golden Globe Foundation with original camera and sound negatives preserved by producer Purnima Dutta of Kolkata's Priya Films. Aranyer Din Ratri, which competed in 1970 for the Golden Bear at the 20th Berlin Film Festival, marks the Mumbai-based Film Heritage Foundation's fourth film in a row in Cannes Classics following Ishanou in 2022, Thamp in 2023 and Manthan in 2024.
Ray's continuing relevance as a word cinema master is underscored by the number of times his films have played in Cannes during his lifetime and since his death. In 2023, his Pratidwandi (The Adversary) was screened as part of Cannes Classics. His debut film, Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road), has been screened in Cannes as many as four times. Besides premiering in 1956, it had a Special Screening in 1992 (as a homage to the filmmaker who had passed away weeks earlier) and was screened in Directors Fortnight in 1995 (to mark the film's 40th anniversary) and in Cannes Classics in 2005 (to mark its 50th anniversary).
Homebound
Besides Pather Panchali, Ray had three titles in Cannes Competition — Parash Pathar (1958), Devi (1962) and Ghare Baire (1984) — besides Ganashatru (1989) in the Special Screenings section. In 2013, one his greatest films, Charulata, was screened in Cannes Classics. This year's Ray screening will be presented by American director Wes Anderson, an avowed admirer of the Bengali director. Anderson, who has a film in Competition (The Phoenician Scheme), made a nod to the 'memory game' in Aranyer Din Ratri in his Asteroid City (2023). Aranyer Din Ratri cast members Sharmila Tagore and Simi Garewal, besides producer Purnima Dutta will be in attendance during the screening.