In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones: A Friend Of The Pirates Comes To Cinemas

“He does it when he’s dreaming of Idi Amin. Idi Amin killed his pop or something,” says Shah Rukh Khan in In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989), appearing within the first few minutes of the film as a half-naked, slightly effeminate slacker with an unfortunate haircut, credited as a nameless “College Senior”. This unflattering appearance was Khan’s first in a feature film, which he left midway, by his own admission, because the writer and the director of the film, Arundhati Roy and Pradip Kishen, cut his screentime. Curiously, his voice—completely devoid of its little quivers and his signature baritone—is heard off-screen before he appears on-screen. Even the most ardent of his fans can be forgiven if they don’t recognise it. It is perhaps prophetic that the film, which does not even attempt to flirt with traditional models of film stardom, sits awkwardly in his filmography on Wikipedia as a “television film”, and not a feature film, despite being feature-length. In the other feature films on his Wikipedia page, he is the star—the narrative anchor and the focus of the film’s advertising. But not in this film.

In many ways, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones embodies everything that mainstream Hindi cinema chose not to be as we moved into the 1990s and into the new millennium. As Kishen said in an interview, this oddball television film was about “unsure, vulnerable characters, not heroes.” Roy, in her memoir Mother Mary Comes To Me (2025), talks about the film as an “eccentric and idiosyncratic project”, which she wasn’t confident would be approved by Doordarshan when it was pitched. To her surprise, Bhaskar Ghose, the new chief at Doordarshan back in the day, was immediately convinced and allocated them a small budget. She states, “It was never meant to be anything more than fun, fringe cinema.” She was astonished that it found an audience at the initial few screenings at film festivals and later, on Doordarshan.

Even though it might have been a surprise to her then, the film’s recent re-release in theatres to packed houses should dispel any doubts about its enduring enchantment, or its relevance in the contemporary. It is a film about a group of architecture students on the verge of submitting their final-year project theses, who navigate, among other things, a tough taskmaster in Mr. Y. D. Billimoria (who they refer to as Yamdoot, played by Roshan Seth), late-night hunger pangs, never-ending ping-pong games, spontaneous sessions of catching chickens and bouts of existential dread. The film, rather like the Richard Linklater classics Dazed and Confused (1993) and its spiritual sequel Everybody Wants Some (2016), captures a brief time period in the life of the young on the verge of major change in their lives. For a film set in the 1970s and made in the 1980s, it refreshingly doesn’t feel burdened by the weight of revolution, nor does it carry significant angst à la Holi (1984) and Aadharshila (1982)—two films emerging from the parallel cinema movement and set in the Film and Television Institute of India (Roy states in her book, “agony did not even make a guest appearance”).

It mostly features young college kids thinking about their place in the world as architects, or, in the case of Radha (played by Arundhati Roy), a disenchantment with architecture. There is even a suicide attempt at one point, treated with restraint and a fair bit of nonchalance. It is, however, to the credit of the cast and crew that the film provides you with a rare five-course sensory experience of college life—you can see the detailed models and charts that the students prepare; hear the corridors of the classrooms and the hostel rooms; smell the sweat and cigarette smoke on the bodies of the students; taste the raw egg one of them downs while high on weed; and, with the camera intimately sitting beside the people populating the screen, you can almost touch the faces of the students. Watching In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones in 2026, therefore, feels like a two-hour conversation with our past versions, and pondering about what we’ve gained and lost in the process.

Perhaps, most importantly, the film comes to us as a rejection of things we have, over time, been conditioned to accept as common sense. Can a rag-tag group of youngsters make a film about youth culture without any “moral value”? Why should the state fund a film about a bunch of college students in a state of ennui? What can a single, late-night showing of the film on Doordarshan do for the film’s viewership? Is the film even relevant now? All of these questions seem somewhat convincingly answered in the wake of the triumphant embrace of the restored version of the film by people of all ages.

But this event organised by the Film Heritage Foundation also forces one to think about who this film really belongs to. While bright and shiny in its restored version, it owes this renewed life to pirates of different generations. Someone taped a recording of the original broadcast in 1989; someone later uploaded a scratchy copy of this copy on YouTube; subsequent pirates downloaded this scratchy copy and digitally remastered them and reuploaded it to YouTube again. Someone then took screenshots of Khan’s brief appearance in the film and uploaded it to different social media platforms. In this community of pirates, the scrappy students of the film found their true comrades—cinephiles determined to keep this film alive on VHS tapes, and as video files on pen drives and hard disks—circulating beyond any clear logic of fandom, controversy or academic value. Their collective effort, resulting in millions of views online, was already a success even without accounting for the re-release in theatres.

This brings to mind Hito Steyerl’s landmark 2009 essay on the digital circulation of what she calls the “poor image”, as the opposite of the perfect image of high-definition cameras. This image accrues value over time as an aesthetic object, acquiring a militant charge through the process of circulation, outside of traditional networks, in the absence of a robust infrastructure for archiving by the state. Kishen has, in many interviews, talked about how, during the restoration process, it was important for him to maintain the grain of the 16mm film that was used to shoot this feature. He had the option of cleaning up the grain and producing a high-quality image using AI, but he refused. Instead, the focus was on cleaning up the scratches on the original film, with the most work being done on improving the sound.

Watching the promotional videos of the restoration by Film Heritage Foundation, which details the difference between the online copies and the restored one, and its subsequent premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, one can’t help but chuckle at the journey of this little “television film”. One can also not unsee the new kinds of transnational industrial networks this film has now been pulled into. But as fate would have it, In Which Annie Gives Those Ones unexpectedly became embroiled in one last act of defiance by its writer and actor Roy. She famously pulled out of the festival citing her discomfort with artists who claimed that art can be divorced from politics. The film, even when it gained a new layer of sheen, retained its bite with a sharp political act. No wonder the loudest cheers in the theatre during the re-release came when her character Radha says to her male companion, “I have a talent for telling people they’re full of crap and expecting to pass.”