The theme of this year's Fantastic Fest is Dishoom Reigns, the wild and wonderful world of Indian genre cinema, so it should be no surprise to our regular readers that I am crazy excited for this event. For those of you who may not know me, I've covered Indian cinema here for a little over six years, and for the last four years I have been a programming consultant to Fantastic Fest to try to bring a little bit more of India's glorious madness to the biggest genre film festival in the USA.
This year is a special one for me. About 10 months ago I was contacted by head programmer Evrim Ersoy to inquire as to whether I thought we could put together a solid Indian program for the 2016 edition of Fantastic Fest. At that point it was just a thought, but for me, it was a huge opening to bring the things I love to the people I cherish in an unprecedented way. It took a little bit of negotiating, but within a couple of months, I was given the green light and the hunt was on for the finest (and wildest) Indian cinema I could find. Little did I know that it would be almost a full time job.
One of the aspects of this sidebar that I am most proud of is the broad spectrum of Indian film that we are covering this year. Many well educated people incorrectly classify any film out of India as Bollywood, when that term only really describes mainstream Hindi language films. There are hundreds of languages spoken in India and dozens of those language groups have their own autonomous film industries. This year we are able to represent four different language groups at the festival, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam, over the course of our six films. We are truly showing you a wide range of what India has to offer.
India is the number one film producing nation in the world with nearly 2,000 films cranked out in over a dozen languages every year. Even so, film preservation is almost completely non-existent, meaning that finding older films that we might be able to show was going to be a challenge. What preservation and archiving efforts do exist are almost entirely dedicated to the arthouse side of Indian cinema, so the hundreds and thousands of action films, horror films, and other genre films that the country cranks out every year are frequently lost to the ravages of time.
I asked all of my contacts on the far side of the world if there was any hope of finding what I was looking for and the answer was almost always a resounding "no." The amazing B-movie action films of Mithun Chakraborthy in the '80s only existed on DVD and VCD now, the crazy Telugu action films of that era starring Chiranjeevi were largely lost except for dodgy unsubtitled YouTube prints, the awesome gangster films of Rajinikanth and Kamal Hassan from the early '80s were all but extinct. Finding 35mm prints of these films was probably going to be impossible. But, I wasn't ready to give up, and together with Evrim Ersoy, I began the hunt for the greatest films India had to offer and we struck gold.
Magadheera
SEE! One Man Take On A Hundred In A 400 Year Old Grudge Match!
Back in 2013 when I started helping out at Fantastic Fest, it was mostly because of a single film, SS Rajamouli's insane housefly revenge film Eega. That movie was too amazing to allow it to languish in obscurity, I needed to make sure my people saw it, and they did. Eega was a huge crowd favorite at Fantastic Fest 2013, which made my first 2016 pick a no-brainer. SS Rajamouli's 2009 epic, Magadheera.
Magadheera is an amazing film that is jam-packed with everything that makes India's Tollywood film industry great. It has a handsome star in Ram Charan, a fetching love interest in Kajal Agarwal, great action, amazing song and dance numbers, and crazy violence that will get your fist pumping and your tears flowing at the same time. It's the perfect storm of what India's masala film formula work so well. There is a place for everything and everything is firmly in its place.
SS Rajamouli is by far the greatest mainstream film director in Tollywood, and his films are the first to break out of that region of India onto the world stage. By the time he made Magadheera, he was already eight years into a fruitful career that had landed him six consecutive box office hits, an unmatched number. He is the only director in Andhra Pradesh to never make a flop, a fact that my Hyderabadi friends made sure to impress upon me when I visited the set of his latest film over the summer.
Magadheera is a superb film that earns every minute of its run time and will be unlike anything a newcomer has experienced in a cinema. From beginning to end, it is a joy to be a part of this four-hundred year epic of love, loss, revenge, and dismemberment.
Aalavandhan
SEE! An Indian Commando Battle His Own Serial Killer Twin Brother To The Death!
Kamal Hassan's Aalavandhan actually came to my attention many years ago through the former blog of Fantastic Fest veteran Grady Hendrix. Hendrix is now an author of some note – go pick up his amazing Horrorstör if you haven't already – but before that, he was one of the most enthusiastic and respected experts on Asian film in the US. He maintained a blog in which he posted some film reviews and recommendations and among those was a Tamil action film called Alavandhan that sounded too insane to be true.
This is the story of a commando, Vijay (played by Kamal Hassan), and his serial killer twin brother, Nandu (also played by Kamal Hassan), and their cat-and-mouse chase to save the Vijay's fiancee from certain death at the end of Nandu's knife. As if India's most respected actor performing in a double role in the film weren't enough, there's enough balls-out insanity in this film to fill a dozen western movies.
Hassan sings and dances, performs insane stunts, puts on two completely different performances, and does it all with remarkable ease. The script is insane, taking the viewer through hostage situations, heroin and ecstasy trips, animated murders, song performances of questionable racial sensitivity, beheadings, facial tattoos, and burly chest-hair inflected love scenes with flair.
Aalavandhan is exactly the kind of movie that could only have some out of India, and specifically out of Tamil Nadu's Kollywood film industry were outside the box insanity is the rule, rather than the exception. On top of all that, we were able to get a brand new HD scan from the original negative of the film, which means no one has ever seen the film look as good as Fantastic Fest is going to. I've seen it a dozen times and I'm still excited to see it for the first time on the big screen.
Khalnayak
SEE! A Bollywood Classic With Beauty, Blood, & Mullets To Spare!
A lot of people think that every film that comes out of India is a Bollywood film, that isn't true at all. The Bollywood title actually only refers to Hindi language mainstream films, of which we are only showing two this year. Only one of those films ever saw general release, and that is Subhash Ghai's all-time classic Khalnayak.
Khalnayak is everything that one thinks of when Bollywood comes to mind. It is brash, melodramatic, musical, violent, and over the top in every way. It's also a stone cold killer on the big screen and full of some of Bollywood's most iconic characters and songs.
The film stars Sanjay Dutt as Ballu, a gangster for life who kidnaps a not entirely unwilling Ganga (Madhuri Dixit, Bollywood's biggest female star of the '90s). Unfortunately for him, Ganga's fiance is Ram, the man who put Ballu behind bars for murder, and he is not happy at all.
What follows is a gloriously over the top cross-country chase in which Ballu and Ganga get closer and closer, while Ram tracks them furiously across the beautiful Indian countryside. But, it isn't just the scenery that's gorgeous, Madhuri Dixit is also one of India's finest classical dancers and her performance in the evergreen hit song Choli Je Peeche Kya Hai (What's Behind the Blouse?) is one of the most famous musical numbers in Bollywood history.
Don't worry, though, it's not all song and dance. Ghai's film also features a ton of amazing action, chases, and best of all, some serious mullet on mullet violence that has to be seen to be believed.
Paanch
SEE! A Long Lost Controversial Classic, Anurag Kashyap's Unreleased Debut Film!
Along with his latest assault on the Indian cinematic paradigm, Psycho Raman, Fantastic Fest is proud to bring the a rare screening of Anurag Kashyap's Paanch to Austin.
Anurag Kashyap is, without a doubt, the most talked about Indian filmmaker on the international circuit today. Over the last twenty years he has built a reputation as one of the industry's most fearless writer/directors and has created mold-shattering works of art. In 2012, his five and a half hour epic Gangs of Wasseypur took the Cannes Film Festival by storm and brought him to a new level of fame. So it might be hard to imagine that his first film, Paanch, never got a release in his native India nor in any other country in the world. But we have it, in a brand new HD scan directly from the negatives.
Paanch is the story of a rock 'n roll band so desperate for fame that they'll do anything to achieve it. A crime spree follows and soon the band, called the Parasites, is on the run from the cops. Paanch, which translates to Five, was the first time Kashyap would run afoul of the censor board in India, but it wouldn't be the last. The film was initially denied certification based on its violent anti-social content. Eventually a certificate was granted, but by that time the producers were scared and refused to distribute it theatrically. Paanch has rarely been seen, and as far as I can tell, it's only been shown once outside of India. This is a rare opportunity, grab it while you can!
Psycho Raman
SEE! An Unrepentant Serial Killer Take On A Crooked Cop!
In a career full of angry, violent films, Anurag Kashyap may have outdone himself with his latest project, Psycho Raman. This film, a visceral and nasty serial killer thriller full of nihilism, drugs, and down and dirty sex, is perhaps Kashyap's more agitated film to date.
Last year Kashyap made a lavish period gangster Bollywood film called Bombay Velvet which was a disaster both critically and at the home box office. This big budget flop was a wake up call to Kashyap, who used his anger and disappointment to create Psycho Raman, a bitter and violent cat-and-mouse chase that brings together equally unsavory opponents in a killer with no remorse and a cop with no morals.
Anchoring the whole project is Nawazuddin Siddiqui as Ramanna, the murderous villain who may not be the worst person in the film. Siddiqui is my favorite working actor in the world today, and quite possibly the busiest. At any given time he has half a dozen or more projects in the works, and his performance are always the highlights of anything he does. He's played second fiddle in major Bollywood blockbusters, but he's most at home in the indies.
You may recognize him from Fantastic Fest 2013 entry, Monsoon Shootout. That was one of ten films he made that year. In 2012, he made seven, and since that film just four years ago, he's made another ten. The man never stops moving, and it shows in his craft. He can destroy you with a look, pierce your soul with a monologue, and he does it with ease. Keep an eye on this guy, he's going places.
Kammattipaadam
SEE! The Violent Birth Of A New Metropolis From The Inside Out!
Kammattipaadam is our wild card. This is a film about the struggle of a trio of young men who are born into the rural Kammatipaadam area of Kochi in Kerala, India. Over time the city grows up around them, and sometimes they are its growing pains.
Director Rajeev Ravi is a longtime cinematographer and frequent collaborator of Anurag Kashyap, having shot his Gangs of Wasseypur, Dev D, Gulaal, Bombay Velvet, and more; however with Kammatipaadam, Ravi shows that he knows exactly what he is doing on his own terms. This is an Indian Once Upon a Time in America. A story that traces a central life over four decades of growth and decay.
More a collection of violent vignettes than a single story, Kammatipaadam features what are sure to be the most colorful characters at Fantastic Fest this year. When I first saw this film, I looked at its three hour run time and settled in for a lot of clock watching, but by the time it ended I wanted more. More time with these characters, more time in this world, I wanted more of this film. Don't judge a book by its run time, Kammatipaadam is well worth the investment.
Do you feel this content is inappropriate or infringes upon your rights?
Click here to report it, or see our
DMCA policy.
