Latest news with #KaranKandhari
Washington Post
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Diary of a mad Mumbai housewife
Startling, dreamlike, frustrating, funny — Karan Kandhari's debut feature, 'Sister Midnight,' is an absolute original. Which doesn't mean this diary of a mad Mumbai newlywed doesn't have its antecedents and influences. In interviews, the British Indian director has spoken of his love for Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, and the film's careful framing of explosively reactive slapstick evokes both classic film comedy and the deadpan precision of Wes Anderson. Yet there are darker sources that take 'Sister Midnight' in disturbing, elliptical directions reminiscent of Roman Polanski's 'Repulsion' and Ana Lily Amirpour's 'A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.'
Vogue
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
How the Sister Midnight Team Made a Punk-Rock Feminist Fable Set in a Mumbai Slum
Sister Midnight is a Mumbai-set black comedy following Uma (Radhika Apte), a headstrong woman fresh from the sticks who's chafing at her arranged marriage to a distant man. As she grapples with isolation and circumscribed domesticity, Uma's frustrations manifest in ways both macabre and surreal (not to mention darkly funny), including sucking blood and galavanting with a gaggle of stop-motion goats. Boasting striking compositions (with every shot evocatively storyboarded), rich colors, and the first score composed by Interpol frontman Paul Banks, writer-director Karan Kandhari's feature debut premiered at last year's Cannes Film Festival in Directors' Fortnight and was nominated for outstanding debut at the BAFTAs. It's a marvelously audacious, utterly sui generis salute to those who defiantly flout tired rules and clash with customs, whether you call that feminism or punk rock; really, they're two sides of the same rebellious coin, Kandhari points out. 'The film is a hymn to being an outsider,' the London-based filmmaker tells Vogue. 'I'm attracted to misfits and weirdos and people who don't fit in society.' The film was inspired by his first visit to Mumbai 20 years ago. 'I was mesmerized by this chaotic city, full of character and contradictions. It possessed me.' He'd always gravitated toward films where specific cities loomed large, like the Hong Kong of Chungking Express and the New York of Taxi Driver. But Mumbai is also a place where he struggled. 'I found it very hard to penetrate. A lot of this film is about loneliness, which I experienced the first time I went there,' he explains. Its story is about operating in the world without a manual, whatever your role: adult, man, woman, husband, wife. 'It spun out from this one moment in the traditional setup of an arranged marriage,' Kandhari says. 'The very next morning, after the dude has gone to work, what happens? The whole thing unfurled from that.'
India Today
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- India Today
Radhika Apte's award-winning film Sister Midnight set for India release
Actor Radhika Apte's internationally-acclaimed film 'Sister Midnight' is set to release in theatres in India on May 23. The film has already received a lot of attention at top global film festivals like BAFTA and Cannes, and now Indian audiences will finally get a chance to watch it.'Sister Midnight' is directed by Karan Kandhari in his debut film and stars Radhika Apte in the lead role. The cast also includes Ashok Pathak, Chhaya Kadam, Smita Tambe, and Navya Sawant. It is produced by Alastair Clark, Anna Griffin, and Alan story is about a woman who wakes up on the first morning after an arranged marriage and finds herself alone at home with no idea of what to do. The film touches on how there are no set rules or manuals for life, especially in about the film, director Karan Kandhari said, 'It started from just the idea of what happens the very first morning in an arranged marriage when the wife wakes up and if the guy goes to work and she's just there and you have no manual to do this' says Karan Kandhari. 'It's really just about the fact that there is no manual for anything in life (sic).' Kandhari also shared that he was inspired by old silent film star Buster Keaton, who used facial expressions and body language to create humour and emotion without saying a word. 'He was one of my heroes because he could do so much with these subtle facial gestures. And just beyond that, as a filmmaker, what he could do with a restricted frame and the body language and stuffthat's my humour(sic),' the director Midnight has already won Best Picture in the Next Wave Award at the Fantastic Fest in Austin, and was nominated for four British Independent Film Awards (BIFA). It has received praise at film festivals around the film released in the United States on May 16 and will be released in France on June 11. Radhika Apte recently shared the news and poster of the film's French release on her viewers can watch Sister Midnight in cinemas across the country starting May Reel
New York Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Sister Midnight' Review: The Feminine Mystique, but Make It Macabre
Malaise turns macabre in 'Sister Midnight,' a shape-shifting tale of an arranged marriage gone awry. The film, written and directed with thrilling originality by Karan Kandhari, is set mostly in the slums of Mumbai and follows a sullen housewife named Uma (Radhika Apte), whose lack of fulfillment manifests as a dark, voracious hunger. Uma is distressed by almost every facet of her new domestic life, but her first agony arrives in the film's opening minutes after her withdrawn husband, Gopal (Ashok Pathak), leaves her in their single-room home without cash for groceries. She's lonely, hungry and bored, and the days that follow offer little to relieve the tedium. As time wears on, her misery gives way to flulike symptoms that send her to bed with fatigue, vomiting and chills. This is when the film takes a turn for the paranormal, with Uma's affliction — and its nastier nighttime expressions — serving as a metaphor for her discontents. If the writer Betty Friedan once abstracted the horrors of being a housewife as 'the problem that has no name,' 'Sister Midnight' calls the horrors just that, and then gives them the genre hallmarks to match. In his first feature, Kandhari makes use of morbid humor and expressive imagery, including stop-motion effects. He rarely relies on dialogue and favors a fuzzier plot, which leaves the story with a shapeless and sometimes confusing midsection. Eventually, a repetitive pattern sets in that can feel stifling. But if it's troubling to us, just imagine how Uma feels.
South China Morning Post
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Move over, Bollywood, Indian art-house cinema on the rise as film festivals take note
'I think it's been a good year for us,' says Payal Kapadia, director of All We Imagine as Light, with almost disarming modesty. Advertisement Twelve months ago, her sensitive, subtle, dreamy film about three women hospital workers in Mumbai became the first Indian drama selected for Cannes Film Festival's main competition in 30 years. It won the Grand Prix, the festival's second-most prestigious prize after the Palme d'Orand. All We Imagine as Light was not the only Indian film to feature at Cannes in 2024. It was joined by Karan Kandhari's droll British-funded marital comedy Sister Midnight, which stars Radhika Apte as a new wife in a Mumbai slum who undergoes an unusual transformation. Beside these two films, Santosh – Sandhya Suri's British-Indian crime yarn starring Shahana Goswami as a widow who inherits her husband's job as a police constable in rural India – and The Shameless, a romantic crime tale that won Anasuya Sengupta the best actress prize in the festival's Un Certain Regard strand, also featured. Advertisement
