13 Indian Films That Dazzled Cannes Through The Ages

Cannes is the mecca of cinema. Amidst the high glamour unfurling on the Croisette, the film festival is where new auteurs are crowned and the year’s essential film catalogue drafted. Its standing ovations hold as much of a reputation as notorious walkouts and boos. Cannes also hosts the Marché du Film, one of the busiest film markets in the world. Across the 60s, 70s and 80s, Indian films consistently showed up in the main competition, a sizeable chunk of which is owed to Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen. As the 90s fizzled out and the new millennium marched, the country blanked out. However, there have always been remarkable selections in parallel sidebars, Un Certain Regard, Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week.

Ahead of the 79th edition that kicks off on May 12, here’s a throwback to the Indian films that leapt out at the festival.

Satyajit Ray probes the tussle between fanaticism and free will, taking on religious orthodoxy, superstition, blind faith and patriarchal power structures. The chiaroscuro lighting by cinematographer Subrata Mitra delivers some of the most haunting images of Ray’s career. Sharmila Tagore regards Devi as her personal favourite amongst all the films she’s done. The film vied for the Palme d’Or alongside Antonioni’s L'Eclisse and Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc.

A young woman, Chinmayi (Mamata Shankar), the sole breadwinner in a seven-member family, doesn’t return home one night. As the hours go by, her family spirals into anxiety. Other tenants of the decrepit house gossip rather than offer empathy or help. Has something happened to her? Did she elope? Mrinal Sen’s Competition title indicts social mores and bourgeoise hypocrisies, whilst constructing a taut drama with no clear answers.

Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s muted, visually eloquent drama is a window into dimming feudal life in 1940s Kerala. The inert, narcissistic Unni is trapped in his own world, bewildered by rapid changes around him. Set almost entirely within the family compound, it’s an elliptical study of a decaying space that’s too caged by history and privilege. The film was in Un Certain Regard, the same year in which Mrinal Sen served on the Competition jury.

The breathlessly accelerating opening 10 minutes of Mrinal Sen’s classic count among his career-best. On a cold winter morning in Calcutta, a ‘servant’ boy, Palan, is found dead in the kitchen. The discovery leads to a web of moral questioning. Accusations are lobbed. The apathetic middle-class is skewered as the central couple, played by Anjan Dutt and Mamata Shankar, confront their guilt, carelessness and casual neglect. The lens sweeps between the household and wider social structures in the most effortlessly elegant manner. Kharij won the Jury Prize, after being screened in the Main Competition section alongside Robert Bresson’s L’Argent and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia.

Nirad Mohapatra made only one fiction feature which turned out to be one of the most quietly arresting masterpieces of Indian cinema. Set in the town of Puri, it’s the gentle, subtle saga of a joint family slowly falling apart, claimed hostage by ambition, opportunity, thickening resentment and vast, sweeping changes. The film premiered at the Critics Week sidebar in Cannes. The restoration of the Odia film by Film Heritage Foundation was shown at the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna.

Mira Nair’s narrative feature debut took the world by storm. An unvarnished, throbbing drama of street children, drug peddlers and sex workers in ‘Maximum City’, the film won the Caméra d’Or and the Audience Award at the Cannes Film Festival, did stellar business both in India and overseas and garnered an Oscar nomination. Nair leavens the film with no cathartic release, but fuels it with unceasing energy, blurring the lines between documentary and fiction. A neorealist gem, Salaam Bombay! unfolds on a propulsive, Dickensian scale.

Shaji N. Karun’s wrenching Un Certain Regard selection trailed an old father’s endless wait for his dead son. The latter, an engineer, was critical of a politician and taken away, never to be seen again. Custodial death hangs over the loss-streaked images. Monsoon rains play into the despair that wells up. This was Shaji’s directorial debut, after a decade of stunning cinematography. It won the Caméra d'Or—Mention Spéciale at Cannes and a Silver Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival.

Screened in its entirety at Directors' Fortnight to a rousing reception, Anurag Kashyap's magnus opus unravels over seven decades of criminal warfare in a mining town. It's excessive, exhilarating. Kashyap explores the price, reach and futility of revenge across generations as the scale of his saga widens. Every character is pleated into a manic, violently feverish orchestra that barely settles down. This was Kashyap at the height of his powers.

Kanu Behl’s searing debut follows a Delhi family raised within a crucible of violence and female subjugation. Grimly riveting and daringly repulsive, Titli traces a circularity of violence travelling from one generation to the next. Everyone is a swindler or liar and the world spun is mercilessly cynical. The film played in Un Certain Regard, alongside Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja and Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure.

Neeraj Ghaywan meshes parallel stories streaming across Varanasi. Tradition and modernity collide in a portrait of small-town aches alongside stirrings of love and shame. Grief and redemption combine in this deeply compassionate drama written by Varun Grover. It won a special jury prize for a film debut in Un Certain Regard as well as a FIPRESCI mention.

Entwining found letters of a film student to her estranged lover with archival footage, student protest videos, Payal Kapadia’s hybrid non-fiction feature is a hypnotic chronicle of idealism shading into horrific reality. Originating against the backdrop of a student strike at FTII in 2015, the film encompasses five years of movements across universities in India. Selected for Directors’ Fortnight, the film beat heavy-hitters like Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground, Andrea Arnold’s Cow, Oliver Stone’s JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass to win the best documentary prize at Cannes.

As Delhi's black kites plummet from the sky, two Muslim brothers run a bird clinic. Shaunak Sen's magisterial, profound documentary finds miraculous moments whilst mapping an intensifying Islamophobic social climate. A sequence with the swirling kites in a meat-tossing occasion might make your heart stop. This is an intimate, expansive meditation on co-existence tucked within a quietly heroic character study. Following its winning the Grand Jury Prize in World Cinema Documentary Competition at Sundance, All That Breathes won the L'Œil d'or Best Docunmentary prize at Cannes. It went on to pick BAFTA and Oscar nominations.

Payal Kapadia ended the 30-year drought of Indian films in main competition with this Grand Prix winner. Shadowing three women trying to make a living in Mumbai—a city that both liberates and rejects—All We Imagine As Light is the ultimate city-ode that’s once romantic and hard-eyed. Its hallucinatory, sublime final act, dissolving lines between the real and imagined, life and death, seems plucked from the fiber of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s cinema.