The 25th anniversary edition of the New York Indian Film Festival — one of the nation’s leading showcases of independent Indian cinema — unspools at New York’s Angelika through Sunday, June 22.
Officially opening Friday, June 20 with Raam Reddy’s 2024 Berlinale selection “The Fable,” the festival includes Anurag Kashyap’s intense Hindi-language thriller “Kennedy” as the Centerpiece on June 21. Kashyap will also host a master class on the challenges facing Bollywood and the future of independent cinema in India.
There’s also a tribute to late, great Indian filmmaker Shyam Benegal, with a 4K restoration of his 1976 landmark “Manthan,” about India’s White Revolution and revived by the Film Heritage Foundation.
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As part of a program of films honoring master storytellers, the New York Indian Film Festival will also screen Dev Benegal’s 2024 short for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “An Arrested Moment.” The film explores Oscar-winning director James Ivory’s fascination with Indian art and culture. Ivory established Merchant-Ivory with his creative and personal partner Ismail Merchant, the Indian film producer who died in 2005. Early indie films made out of India from the director/producer pair include “The Householder,” “Shakespeare Wallah,” and “Bombay Talkie” before they transitioned famously to adapting classic, canonical English-language novels.
“An Arrested Moment” plays June 22 with Taira Malaney’s documentary “Turtle Walker,” which explores the population of enigmatic sea turtles living along the coasts of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
This year’s New York Indian Film Festival actually kicked off on Thursday, June 19 with the North American premiere of “Tanvi the Great,” which marks Anupam Kher’s first directing effort in two decades; the political and personal epic, about a young woman confronting her father’s military legacy, premiered at the Cannes Market earlier this year. Kher has worked as a lauded actor on Indian productions since the early 1980s, best known for his onscreen performances and acting school (he previously directed 2002’s “Om Jai Jagadish”). Robert De Niro surprised Kher with an appearance at the Angelika screening.
Kaushal Oza’s directorial debut, the coming-of-age film “Little Thomas,” closes the festival, and it follows an only child in 1990s Goa trying to help his parents give him a baby brother.
Other highlights include Aditya Kriplani’s fiction-and-reality-blurring fame critique “I’m Not an Actor” with “Sacred Games” star Nawazuddin Siddiqui; an LGBTQ double feature for Pride Month” with the gay romance “Riptide” followed by the short “IYKYK”; Nikhil Mahajan’s climate change tale “The Tiger,” about the struggle between human and tigers in a remote village; and much more.
See the full schedule and buy tickets via New York Indian Film Festival’s official website here.
