Move over Bollywood, Indian art-house cinema is on the rise and picking up awards



Indian art-house cinema is flourishing, showing a different side to the Indian movie industry best known for its glossy Bollywood films.

โ€œI think itโ€™s been a good year for us,โ€ says Payal Kapadia, director of All We Imagine as Light, with almost disarming modesty.

Twelve months ago, her sensitive, subtle, dreamy film about three women hospital workers in Mumbai became the first Indian drama selected for the Cannes Film Festivalโ€™s main competition in 30 years.

It won the Grand Prix, the festivalโ€™s second-most prestigious prize after the Palme dโ€™Orand.

All We Imagine as Light was not the only Indian film to feature at Cannes in 2024. It was joined by Karan Kandhariโ€™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 โ€“ Sandhya Suriโ€™s British-Indian crime yarn starring Shahana Goswami as a widow who inherits her husbandโ€™s job as a police constable in rural India โ€“ and The Shameless, a romantic crime tale that won Anasuya Sengupta the best actress prize in the festivalโ€™s Un Certain Regard strand, also featured.

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