Apart from the mainstream song-and-dance fare, this year's Indian Film Festival in the German city of Stuttgart has many offbeat movies from all over India on show.
Tapsee Pannu plays the lead role in the film 'Loop Lapeta'Image: Indisches Filmfestival Stuttgart/Loop Lapeta
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Highlights of the Indian Film Festival Stuttgart 2022
For nearly two decades, the film festival in the southern German town has been bringing movies of all kinds from the Indian subcontinent to European viewers.
Titled "Jhund," Hindi for mob, this movie tells the story of Vijay Barse, who founded the NGO Slum Soccer in the western Indian city of Nagpur in an attempt to improve the lives of underprivileged children. Superstar Amitabh Bachchan plays Barse in the movie.
Directed by Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas, the movie tells the story of "Khabar Lahariya," a rural newspaper. Its name literally means "news waves" in Hindi and it began as an all-women project in northern India's Uttar Pradesh. Many of its reporters are rural women who have become literate only recently. The outlet has now become an important source of information for local people.
Image: Indisches Filmfestival Stuttgart/Writing with Fire, 2022
'Kasiminte Kadal'
Based on author Anees Salim's popular novel "The Small-Town Sea," the Malayalam-language movie directed by Shyamaprasad tells the story of a teenage boy who moves to a little seaside town with his terminally ill father.
This is another film in Malayalam, a language spoken mainly in the southern Indian state of Kerala, where director Vinod Bharathan comes from. "Karma Café" follows a man who returns to India after leaving a difficult job abroad. He decides to open a French café there. His ideas clash with his inexperience in running a business and with the conservative attitudes of the locals.
In this Indian version of German director Tom Tykwer's "Run Lola Run," actor Tapsee Pannu plays the role of the woman who is faced with different choices as she seeks to somehow get back the bag of cash her boyfriend has lost. The film is directed by Aakash Bhatia.
Directed by Navin Chandra Ganesh, this documentary is about the Banchhada tribal community in central India, where women traditionally secure the family's livelihood, as girls are turned into prostitutes. The birth of a baby girl is considered a lucky event in the community.
What does the French director Jean Luc Godard have to do in a village in Bengal? Directed by Amartya Bhattacharya, this movie tries to answer that question, by telling the story of an old man who regularly watches porn, and accidentally comes across a video of a Godard movie.
Directed by Manish Saini, the film is the story of two boys, Mintoo and Mitra, who love playing pranks. One day, a chance occurrence leads Mintoo to proclaim Mahatma Gandhi as his role model, but Mintoo is far from embodying the Mahatma's ideals.
Until some years ago, the festival in Germany's southern city of Stuttgart was called "Bollywood and beyond," a celebration of mainstream Indian cinema, with arthouse movies on the margins. But the standard song-and-dance theatrics were beginning to get expensive for organizers of Stuttgart's annual event.
"This Bollywood factor, you can clearly say now, was a huge industry and as a small festival in Stuttgart, we could not keep up with it," says Hans-Peter Jahn, the festival's spokesman. Bollywood film producers often demand high prices for big movies, and it would have been impossible to present an actor from these films in Stuttgart, he explained.
However, the era of the big Bollywood movie seems to be ebbing and new, more engaged filmmakers are presenting their movies, Jahn added. As luck would have it, pandemic-induced lockdowns proved a boon for low-budget filmmakers, who also profited from domestic and global exposure on streaming websites like Amazon Prime and Netflix.
The festival also brings German fans of Indian cinema togetherImage: DW/M.Gopalakrishnan
The underdog's day in the sun
This year's selection offers a wide variety of works from almost all parts of India. One of the festival's highlights is the Oscar-winning documentary directed by Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas, "Writing with Fire."
The film tells of the struggle of women who run the "Khabar Lahariya" (Hindi for "Waves of news”), a newspaper in rural northern India. For many people who live in the area, the newspaper provides an independent source of information. The newspaper was also honored for its remarkable work by DW at the Global Media Forum in 2014.
Other entries this year include "Shankar's Fairies" by director Irfana Majumdar, which tells the story of a master-servant relationship over generations.
"Tangra Blues" is a rap musical in Bengali. It narrates the stories of slum children in Kolkata who want to make it big in life.
Directed by Manjari Makiani, "Skater Girl" tells a similar story, about a girl who wants to defy her village's restrictive culture which keeps female family members from leaving the house and having them marry early.
A major highlight in this year's event is "Jhund" (Hindi for herd), which features the Indian superstar Amitabh Bachchan, and is based on the life of Vijay Barse, who founded the NGO Slum Soccer in Nagpur, in western India.
10 influential Indian artists
As the Beethovenfest Bonn welcomes musicians from India for its Campus Project 2018, DW revisits some of the country's most important and popular contemporary stars.
Image: Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images
Ravi Shankar
In the 1950s, Ravi Shankar (1920-2012) was one of the first to popularize Indian music in the West. The meditative sound and the soaring drive of the ragas of this sitar virtuoso inspired and influenced different musicians, from violinist Yehudi Menuhin to Beatle George Harrison (photo).
Image: AP
Zubin Mehta
The star conductor was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1936 and went to Vienna to study at the age of 18. Zubin Mehta has celebrated a successful career in Europe, the US and Israel, all while remaining connected to his homeland. For instance, he has created a foundation to support the popularization of classical western music in India.
Image: Getty Images/AFP/J. Jordan
Yash Chopra
The Hindi film industry would never have become such an internationally successful phenomenon without the late filmmaker and producer Yash Chopra (1932-2012). Known as the "King of Romance" of Indian cinema, Chopra was behind some of the cult classics that established the Bollywood brand outside of India.
Image: Getty Images/AFP/C. Court
Shah Rukh Khan
And here's the "King of Bollywood": Superstar Shah Rukh Khan, also known as SRK, is the most successful actor in India — he has more fans worldwide than Johnny Depp and Tom Cruise combined. His roles in hit melodramatic films have established him as the quintessential "romantic hero," with his humor and charisma definitely contributing to his charm.
Image: Getty Images/AFP/S. Verma
Raj Kapoor
Kapoor (1924-1988) was one of the most influential actors and filmmakers in the history of cinema. The "greatest showman of Hindi cinema" conquered the hearts of the Indian people and critics alike in the 1950s. Instead of portraying heroic figures, he was one of the first to embody "the ordinary man" with likable weaknesses. He has been immortalized in wax at Madame Tussaud's Museum in India.
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/A. Qadri
Subodh Gupta
Contemporary art "made in India" has been booming for decades, and one of the scene's most successful stars is Subodh Gupta. His works fetch record prices on the art market. Bihar, the state where Gupta was born, is one of the poorest in India. He uses ordinary items in his work that reflect his own childhood as well as India's 20th-century transformation.
Image: Imago/H. Förster
Kajol
Award-winning film actress Kajol Devgan is one of the most famous and popular stars in Bollywood. The Indian beauty icon is also a social activist and the mother of two children.
Image: Imago/ZUMA Press/A. Khan
Arundhati Roy
The Indian author was among Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2014. After winning the Man Booker Prize in 1997 with her novel "The God of Small Things," she became a prominent anti-globalization activist.
Image: picture-alliance/ANSA/G. Onorati
A.R. Rahman
The composer's film scores combine Indian classical music with electronic beats. A.R. Rahman's soundtrack for Danny Boyle's 2008 film "Slumdog Millionaire" won a Golden Globe and two Academy Awards — a first for an Asian. He was also included on the Time 100 list of the world's most influential people in 2009.
Image: Getty Images/AFP/J. Samad
Balkrishna Doshi
In 2018 the 90-year-old architect was honored with the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the world's top award in the field. The jury noted his "deep sense of responsibility and a desire to contribute to his country and its people through high quality, authentic architecture." The Aranya Low Cost Housing, one of his most noteworthy designs, offers a solution to the housing shortage in the Indore state.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/A. Solanki
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Rethinking Gandhi
Another of the organizers' "must-see" recommendations is the film "Adieu Godard" by director Amartya Bhattacharya, about a man in a village in Bengal, who usually watches porn movies every evening. One day, he accidentally borrows a video of the French director Jean Luc Godard and gets hooked to his movies. He then proposes a Godard film festival in his village, creating confusion and controversy.
Manish Saini's film "Gandhi & Co," about two children who love to play pranks, revisits the Mahatma's culture significance.
Films from south India include "Kasiminte Kadal," by director Shyamaprasad, about a teenage boy who is forced to move into a seaside town with his terminally ill father. Another one is "Karma café," by Vinod Bharathan, about a man who returns from abroad and must prove himself to the world outside.
Short films include "Bedsores" by Navin Chandra Ganes; the documentary depicts the lives of members of the Banchhada tribe in central India, where the birth of girls is considered lucky.
"Cheepatakadumpa" by Devashish Makhija takes viewers through the lives of three male friends who talk openly about their sexual experiences.
One of India's legendary actors: Amitabh Bachchan in a movie still from 1981Image: Ronald Grant Archive/imago images
At the end of the festival on July 24, jury members will announce winners in three categories, including Best Feature Film, Best Documentary and Best Short Film. Winners in the first category will be awarded €4,000, while the other two categories carry a prize of €1,000 each.
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Medal for Indian film curator
The Stuttgart Indian Film Festival is organized every year by the Filmbüro Baden-Württemberg. The main sponsor of the event is Andreas Lapp, entrepreneur and Baden-Württemberg's honorary consul for the Republic of India. This year, organizers are also honoring the festival's curator, the Mumbai-based Uma da Cunha, who has been curating films for the event for nearly two decades.
Uma da Cunha (left) has been curating the festival for nearly two decadesImage: Indisches Filmfestival Stuttgart
The curator will be awarded the Staufer medal of the state of Baden-Württemberg by state premier Winfried Kretschmann on July 20. Since the late 1970s, da Cunha has been helping organize Indian film festivals abroad, including in Toronto and Busan, and is the founding advisor of Indian film festivals in Los Angeles, London, the Hague, Montreal and Houston.
She is also a prominent casting director, having worked on films like Jane Campion's "Holy Smoke," Deepa Mehta's "Water" and Ashutosh Gowarikar's "Lagaan." In 2009, da Cunha was a jury member at the Cannes festival for the category Un Certain Regard.
