It was an eventful year for Indian mainstream cinema. Moviegoers returned in hordes for the theatrical experience. Blockbusters minted big bucks. SRK ruled the roost like never before. Box-office powerhouses of the South demonstrated their enduring crowd-pulling prowess. Mammootty chose films that made us sit up and marvel. Vidhu Vinod Chopra's 12th Fail soared without the aid of star power. But there were plenty of films out there that made 2023 special. They reaffirmed the beauty of small and independent. They made a strong impact at international film festivals and in the multiplexes (if only in a handful of instances). The year's top ten niche films that strained to break free from their market-enforced confines:
FAMILY
Writer-director-editor Don Palathara does not put a foot wrong in Family, a spare, piercing tale of religious manipulation of a closely-knit rural flock. The impeccably crafted Malayalam film employs strikingly subtle methods to probe the Church's centrality in a village in Kerala's Idukki district, where the guardians of morality close ranks instinctively to shield those that they regard as their own. The central figure (Vinay Forrt) is a man the village cannot do without. A lurking leopard sparks fear. But there is worse afoot in the village that is as quick to condemn and censure as it is to condone. Couched in the film's unerring cultural specificity and social inquisitions are universal truths about human propensities. Family reinforces Palathara's reputation as a filmmaker with a voice entirely his own
MAAGH - THE WINTER WITHIN
Aamir Bashir's second film in an intended Kashmir trilogy - the first, Harud, was made over a decade ago - is inarguably one of the most powerful Indian films of the year. It won Audience Awards in Busan and Nantes and played in festivals in Kerala and Dharamshala. It deserves a much wider audience. Maagh maps the anguish of Kashmir on the face of a care-worn woman and in its snow-covered landscapes. The woman (a terrific Zoya Hussain) searches for her husband who she believes is in a detention centre for suspected militants. She works as a domestic worker in Srinagar and weaves intricate shawls to complement her income. Fired from her job, she returns to her remote village enveloped in deathly silence and life takes an unexpected turn. The visually stunning but distressing Maagh highlights the plight of half-widows but does not stop there. The cinematic cri de Coeur is equally concerned with the toll that continuing violence takes on its victims.
WHISPERS OF FIRE AND WATER
Debutant Lubdhak Chatterjee's Whispers of Fire and Water blends image and sound to sublime perfection in the service of a stark portrait of exploitation and denudation of the coal mining belt of Jharkhand's Jharia. The Hindi-Bengali film follows an audio installation artist who wends his way through the region to record sounds of despair and dispossession. The sights and the crackle of decay affects him deeply. He meets a migrant mine worker from a tribal village. The barrenness of a land sucked dry by mining and an underground fire is contrasted with the harmonious vibrations of a dense forest that is home to the tribals of the area. The film's subdued drama emanates as much from the soundscape as from the visuals.
POKHAR KE DUNU PAAR
First-time director Parth Saurabh's distinct voice comes through with perfect clarity in Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar. The film centres on the uncertainty that grips an eloped couple who return to Darbhanga amid the Coronavirus pandemic. If running away from home was disruptive, returning is no less so. The father of the girl, Priyanka (Tanaya Khan Jha), has disowned her. The boy, Sumit (Abhinav Jha), looks for a job in vain. As he drifts aimlessly, he reconnects with his old friends, driving a wedge between him and Priyanka. The lovers' ardour is in danger of turning as decrepit as their hometown. Real, relatable characters, conversational dialogues and visual compositions that combine the instinctive and the heightened set Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar apart from run-of-the-mill romantic stories of defiant lovers tested by circumstances.
RAPTURE
The wages of fear-mongering are examined with sharp-eyed clarity in Dominic Sangma's Garo-language film, Rapture (Rimdogittanga). It forays into the heart of the darkness that engulfs a community that is led to believe the worst. A gradual blurring of the line between social solidarity and tendentious, illogical paranoia drives a Meghalaya village to the brink. Sangma's muted storytelling style not only imparts depth to the timely cautionary tale, it also occurs acute delineation of the undercurrents that hinge on mix of unreasonable fear and blinding hatred. A boy witnesses a brutal act. Nightmares push him into delirium. But among the adults, prejudice has no limits. Rapture is a story rooted in a place. But the import of what it spells out has relevance beyond its geography.
NIHARIKA IN THE MIST
Indrasis Acharya's Niharika in the Mist, an emotionally engaging portrait of a young woman (played superbly by Anuradha Mukherjee) seeking to live down the scars of an unhappy childhood, employs remarkably refined methods to portray suppressed emotions and barely articulated urges. The protagonist looks to anchor herself in a place that makes her feel safe and empowered. The serene landscape - the film is set in a little hamlet on the Bihar-Jharkhand border - provides a contrast to the turmoil in the woman's heart as she strives to wrest control of her life. Having grown up surrounded by an ailing grandfather, an abusive father, a predatory uncle and several suffering women, she searches for stability in the home of a maternal uncle, a striving that isn't without its own complications. Niharika is a female-centric film steers clear of worn-out tropes.
AATTAM
In first-time director Anand Ekarshi's sure-footed Malayalam film Aattam, the insidious workings of patriarchy and moral expediency play out in circles traditionally considered progressive. Set in the world of theatre and its practitioners, the film is a stinging commentary on the place of women in male-dominated spheres. The only female member (Zarin Shihab) in a drama troupe complains of sexual misconduct. At the behest of the woman's boyfriend (Vinay Forrt), a married actor going through a messy divorce, a meeting is convened to discuss the accusation. Consensus eludes the men. The lure of a foreign tour dilutes their resolve to hold the culprit to account. Talk of a compromise begins. A seemingly open-minded, gender-sensitive bunch of men waver and retreat into old habits and questionable ways of thinking. The power of Aattam flows from its dispassionate yet hard-hitting expose of entrenched gender faultlines.
THREE OF US
A charming, heartwarming drama, Avinash Arun Dhaware's Three of Us journeys into the world of a woman (Shefali Shah) who is slowly losing her memory. She requests her insurance agent-husband (Swanand Kirkire) to take a week off so that they can travel to the Konkan town where she went to school. Once there, the woman looks for an old soulmate (Jaideep Ahlawat) to not only relive a phase of her life that ended abruptly but also to come to terms with a personal tragedy that forced her to leave for Mumbai without bidding goodbye. Three of Us is a delectable and moving story of beginnings and interruptions, of forgetting and remembering. Powered by three exquisite performances, the cinematographer-director's flawless craft and a marvellous original score by Alokananda Dasgupta, this is a treat like no other Hindi film that made it to our multiplexes in 2023.
GOLDFISH
One of two films about a dementia-afflicted woman made in 2023, Goldfish, like Three of Us, is helmed by a cinematographer-director. But that and the quality of the writing and acting apart, it is tonally unlike Avinash Arun's film. Goldfish has Deepti Naval in the role a woman whose memory begins to slip away. Kalki Koechlin plays her estranged daughter who returns to their suburban London home during the pandemic and struggles to reconnect with a mother she drifted away from years ago. Goldfish isn't exactly a two-hander, but the delicate exploration of a strained mother-daughter relationship acquires quiet and consistent power due to the pivotal duet of brilliant performances. A perfect blend of heart and craft, the film favours conventional linear storytelling without succumbing to the easy methods that filmmakers are lulled into by its established dynamics.
SHESH PATA
The odd one out because the Bengali film written and directed by Atanu Ghosh is the only entry in this list that is toplined by a certified star. But in substance and spirit, Shesh Pata (The Last Page) never loses its independent spirit. A hard-edged yet tender character study that delves into the psyche of a jaded writer (played by Prosenjit Chatterjee) who has retreated into a brittle shell in the aftermath of a tragedy and finds himself incapable of putting pen to paper, the film has phenomenal tonal and textual consistency. Ghosh's organic cinematic craft and a top-notch lead performance lend Shesh Pata consistent solidity. Exceptionally intelligent plotting creates room for the supporting characters who serve to complete a vivid portrait of a city and a society sitting on a mound of paradoxes triggered by sweeping socio-economic changes. Shesh Pata is no ordinary accomplishment.