In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones Restoration To Premiere At Berlin Film Festival

The 76th Berlin Film Festival will premiere the new restoration of Pradip Krishen's 1989 film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones as part of its Classics section. At architecture college in 1974 New Delhi, student Annie fails his final exams four times because the dean has it in for him. Now he is facing his fifth attempt. Over the years, the whimsical, delightfully irreverent campus comedy with a screenplay by Arundhati Roy grew as a cult hit. Roy had also written the screenplay for Krishen's 1992 film Electric Moon. This was before she became a global phenomenon with her 1997 Booker Prize-winning novel The God Of Small Things.

Roy brought her own memories of studying architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi to bear and plays one of the lead roles. The film was aired late one night in 1989 on Doordarshan. It went on to win two National Awards for Best Screenplay and Best Feature Film in English. In November 2015, Roy returned her award to protest against rising intolerance, attacks on freedom of speech, and violence on minorities in India under the current government.

The 4K restoration done by the Film Heritage Foundation at L’Immagine Ritrovata’s lab was a cooperative venture with India’s National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) and the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) and the director, using the 16 mm camera negative and a 35 mm print.

Speaking about the film Krishen said, “When we made In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones almost four decades ago, it was unique in the sense that no one was making films about people like us, about the English-speaking student subculture where the characters spoke their own patois.”

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, director of FHF, said, “In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones was a pathbreaking film at the time it was made — arguably the first ‘English’ film, irreverent and idiosyncratic, with a screenplay and dialogues that captured so authentically the student milieu of the ’70s."

Arundhati Roy will attend the premiere of the restoration. The two other selected Indian films at the festival are both in the Panorama section: Madhusree Dutta's documentary Flying Tigers and R Gowtham's debut Members Of The Problematic Family.