Climate Change, Societal Ills, Mysticism Among Subjects Explored in South Asian Oscar Contenders
12.12.2023 - 10:35
/ variety.com
Naman Ramachandran A range of subjects, ranging from hot button to mystical, await Academy voters considering the contenders from South Asia in the international feature category. The most visible film from the region is certainly Bhutan’s “The Monk and the Gun,” Pawo Choyning Dorji‘s follow-up to the Oscar-nominated “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom.” In the film, Dorji uses the first elections in one of the world’s youngest democracies to comment on what is lost as his country modernizes. The Variety critics pick, following its festival premieres at Telluride, Toronto, Rome and Busan, sold to a raft of major territories worldwide, including Roadside Attractions in the U.S.
Another South Asian feature in the Oscar race that’s striking a high profile is Pakistani-Canadian filmmaker Zarrar Kahn’s “In Flames,” Pakistan’s entry to the category. The film debuted at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, kicking off a stellar festival run including Toronto, Busan, Sitges, Pingyao, Helsinki, SXSW Sydney and Red Sea. U.S.
distribution, that all-important factor for films vying for attention in the category, is by Game Theory Films. In the Karachi-set film, after the death of the family patriarch, a mother and daughter’s precarious existence is ripped apart by figures from their past — both real and phantasmal. Alongside the film’s supernatural and horror elements is a very real societal ill that plagues all of South Asia — patriarchy.
In the process of building visibility are films from the most prolific South Asian filmmaking cultures, India and Bangladesh. The submissions from here focus on the universal hot button subject of climate change. The Indian contender is Jude Anthany Joseph’s survival drama “2018,” based on the floods in
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