As he does every year, peace activist Harsh Mander offers his take on the best films he saw in 2024.
2024 was another troubled year in India’s 75-year journey as a republic. The people of the country went to vote in the largest election that the world has yet seen. This was in some ways India’s most critical ballot since freedom, because had voters given the ruling BJP a full majority, many feared that India would not have remained a secular democracy. Yet the reduced mandate for the BJP did little to sober or restrain the ruling establishment. Religious hate crimes soared since the elections, bulldozers razed shrines and homes, hate speech choked the air until we gagged, and new temples are being repeatedly claimed under an assortment of centuries-old mosques. Manipur, mostly forgotten, continues to bleed in its civil war without end. Kashmir and the forests of central India remain militarised. As India’s richest men dodge credible charges of spectacular global corruption or splurge on one of the most expensive wedding celebrations in history, India slips lower in the Global Hunger Index than most of its much poorer Asian neighbours. Some of the country’s best hearts and minds remain locked behind high prison walls. Fear has become a staple of everyday life.
The films of 2024, like those in all of the decade past, rarely spoke to any of this. But despite this, 2024 was a landmark year for Indian cinema. I waited in vain for films of conscience. But this year at least I found an array of films of compassion. Many films were made in many languages which reflected on the human condition with luminous humanism. There were remarkable films on impoverishment, loss and loneliness, mostly illuminated with hope and love. Amid the cacophony of hate and the indifference of inequality, Indian cinema found its heart.
Also read: In a Dark Year, Films and Series That Spoke of Idealism, Courage and Hope
For me way ahead the best film of the year was a barely noticed little masterpiece, Rima Das’s Assamese willowy feature Village Rockstars 2. The film inherits the lyricism of Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, the gentle social anger of Bimal Roy’s neo-realist classic Do Bigha Zameen and the compassionate scrutiny of human nature of many Ritwik Ghatak films. With exquisitely crafted visuals and mostly non-professional actors, Das chronicles in an Assamese village the timeless story of the coming of age of a teenaged girl, amidst grinding poverty, hunger, flood, displacement, corporate greed, her single mother’s sickness and death, and her brother’s alcoholism. The young protagonist quietly wills for her dreams for herself to fade as she robustly holds her family together.
An unexpected joy was the Tamil film Meiyazaghan directed by C Prem Kumar. A middle-aged man (Arvind Swamy in one of his finest performances) travels reluctantly from Chennai to his estranged hometown Thanjavur for the first time in 22 years. He still carries in his heart pain and bitterness against his relatives who tricked his family out of their ancestral property, forcing them to leave Thanjavur forever. There he meets a man he does not recognise, who initially exasperates him. But in the hours that he is forced to spend with him, he is moved profoundly by his unaffected goodness and kindness to all living beings. Those hours with this selfless man compel him to search within himself, to locate his own capacities for decency and for forgiveness. This surprisingly affecting film is a fable-like tale of the healing power of goodness.
Another film that haunted me long after I watched it was Blessey’s Malayalam Aadujeevitham or The Goat Life. Based on a true story of a Malayali immigrant Najeeb in the Gulf, this harrowing account is of the worker being kidnapped by an Arab straight from the airport where he first arrives from India. He is driven deep into the heart of the desert where he is forced into slave labour of tending goats. He has no way to contact his family and the outside world, and for years has little human contact; his only company for many months is the goats with who he develops a communion. Ultimately, he makes a desperate bid to escape and nearly dies when for several days he is lost in the deserts with little food and water. It is a kind Arab who saves his life. The stunning visuals of the desert and the humanity that the gentle central protagonist sustains through all his travails elevate this from a survival drama into a meditation on life and what gives life meaning.
One more small film with a large heart was Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies. It takes off from an unlikely premise of two veiled brides who get swapped in a crowded passenger train. But the narrative develops into a rousing, funny and sometimes tender feminist fable of rural patriarchy. One bride cannot remember the name of the village into which she was married; the other wilfully hides her identity because she had been forced into marriage with an abusive man and prevented from studying further. Both the women grow in strength and mettle in the course of their predicament. The performances are captivating, of Nitanshi Goel and Pratibha Ranta as the misplaced brides, and Chhaya Kadam as a tea-stall owner who shelters one of the brides. Sparsh Shrivastava soars as the bridegroom who steadfastly loves and believes in his lost bride.
A delicately crafted film on loneliness, longing and female solidarity in three languages – Malayalam, Marathi and Hindi – has captured the imagination of audiences the world over. This is Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light. Two Malayali nurses share an apartment in Mumbai. The husband of the older one left for Germany and for years has not communicated with her. The younger one has a secret love affair with a Muslim man. Their friend at work is a cook in the hospital, a single woman displaced from her small tenement by a real-estate builder. The two nurses travel with the cook to her seaside village in Ratnagiri to help her relocate after she loses her tenement. It is here, freed temporarily from the metropolis, that the three women in different ways find inner anchor, through love, through friendship and even a little magic realism. The last haunting sequence of the three women laughing in a shack by the sea at night, finding strength in acceptance and the friendship of each other, is a motif that best defines the film.
A small neglected gem this year was Kannan Iyer’s Ae Watan Mere Watan, on young and little-known freedom fighters. In the cynical times that young people are today condemned to grow in, the film is a salutary reminder of the idealism that stirred tens of thousands of youths during the Indian struggle for freedom. This is something that P. Sainath has accomplished with worth and power in his recent book The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom. Sainath recalls for us the masses of ordinary people who sacrificed their lives and futures for India’s freedom, but who are now forgotten. Iyer’s film attempts the same, but of course with considerably less distinction. Still, despite many blemishes (most of all the way it reduces the English characters into caricatures) the film makes it to my list for its portrayal of the young people who ached to sacrifice their futures for their country’s freedom, including a young Muslim man with polio and a plucky young woman who starts an underground radio during the Quit India movement of 1942.
Two films that make my selection are much starker, more brutal, less hopeful. One of these is the Punjabi film Jaggi, directed by Anmol Sidhu. Here you encounter a Punjab that is merciless, severe, even on occasion vile. It offers a troubling counter-point to the celebrated, upbeat, violent, sexist hyper-masculinity of Punjabi pop, holding up a mirror instead to its devastating consequences. In an unforgiving and heartbreaking portrayal, Ramnish Chaudhary lives his character as a teenager subjected to relentless sexual abuse. He has nowhere to turn. His parents are absent: his father a policeman who comes home drunk every night, and his mother in a relationship with his uncle. His teachers and friends taunt him for being less of a man, and many sexually abuse him. The tragic denouncement at the end seems to a eulogy not just to the boy but to a land in perpetual turmoil.
And then there is Sandhya Suri’s bleak Santosh, long-listed for the Oscars. A young police constable is killed on duty in a communal riot. His widow is awarded a compassionate compensatory recruitment as a police constable. Played masterfully by Shahana Goswami, she finds herself thrust immediately into the vortex of a criminal justice system that is rotten to the core. Corruption is endemic, hatred for Muslims universal, caste discrimination an entrenched blight, and police torture a routine, even valorised core of everyday policing. These are recreated with chilling, remorseless authenticity. All of this agonisingly comes together when an innocent Muslim man is framed and tortured to death for the gang-rape and killing of a Dalit girl by upper-caste local politicians. The newly recruited woman constable is not just witness to all of this, she quickly becomes a willing participant. In the most harrowing sequence in the film, she joins even in the torture of the Muslim man, partly driven because her husband was killed in a communal riot. I found the film hard to watch because in it no character held up a moral compass, not even the new woman recruit. But maybe this is a mirror to the new India that we must acknowledge and confront.
Brave, then, for the times that we live in is Onir’s doomed love story We are Faheem and Karun. Think of Karun, a Malayali soldier, a security officer posted at a checkpoint in Kashmir, falling in love with Faheem, a local Kashmiri man. It is a love story that defiantly transgresses so many pitiless boundaries. Of gender, of religion, and of competing nationalities. The violence of Kashmiri militancy and the military response of the Indian state play out only in the background through much of the film, and is foregrounded just during the poignant climax. When I saw the film in its opening screening in the Dharamsala Festival this autumn, some Kashmiris in the audience spoke with passion of their disappointment, even rage, that the film did not depict the horrors of military suppression in the valley. Onir, the director explained gently why he made this film. He wished to light a candle in the decades-long darkness in Kashmir, to speak of the imperative for love, the courage of love, perhaps the impossibility of love through this doomed love story.
And maybe it was this that distinguished the best of Indian cinema of 2024. The films may not have spoken directly to the politics of hate, inequality, oligarchy and unfreedoms of our age. But most did speak incandescently of love, of friendship and of kindness in ways that were defiant, even transgressive. This was the form of resistance that the cinema of 2024 chose to offer to these dark times.
Harsh Mander is a social worker and writer.
