India
Sebastian Scotney
You can't explain stage presence like Anoushka Shankar’s. It just "is". When she steps out in front of a completely packed Royal Albert Hall, and utters a welcoming, exploratory, London-ish “Hi... welcome to my Prom… Oh, my God!”, a friendly connection with audience is made. Instantly and with disarming ease.Then come memories: she thinks back to having participated with her father in the Ravi Shankar Prom in 2005 and her further three appearances since then, notably one in 2020 with no audience: “It’s so much nicer to have you guys all in here.”And then, from the moment she starts to play, Read more ...
graham.rickson
All We Imagine as Light focuses on the lives of three women in contemporary Mumbai; as shown by director Payal Kapadia, the city is arguably the film’s fourth major character. Kapadia eschews convention, her metropolis painted in muted colours with dark skies and heavy rain a constant.We first see Prabha (Kani Kusruti) on the long journey home to the cramped flat she shares with her younger colleague Anu (Divya Prabhu); as in many western cities, their key worker salaries aren’t sufficient to allow them to live a reasonable distance to their city centre hospital.Kusruti is an extraordinary Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Held up by the censors in India though screened at Cannes and nominated for an International Oscar, Sandhya Suri’s 2024 film Santosh serves as a bookend to Payal Kapadia’s poignant All We Imagine As Light, about women in Mumbai experiencing less hassled lives outside the city. Suri’s heroine moves in the reverse direction. She is Santosh (Shahana Goswami), wife of a handsome young policeman in a state that is apparently a disguised Utter Pradesh, where the film was shot. Hers is a “love marriage”, and her grief when her husband is killed on duty at an anti-police riot is palpable. As she Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Radhika Apte has been acclaimed for her ebullient performance as a reluctant bride in Sister Midnight since director Karan Kandhari’s comic horror movie was launched at Cannes last May. Talking over Zoom from her home near Epping Forest, Apte, 38, quickly stresses that it wasn’t the film's topic of arranged marriage that made her sign up for Kandhari’s feature debut. What she loved about his script, she says, “is the wild and weirdly wonderful way it tackles the feeling of not fitting in, and the eventual journey of accepting oneself as one is with all the imperfections.”Apte’s Uma Read more ...
James Saynor
Marriage is not often presented in cinema as a bowl of mangoes, but it’s rarely shown as so morbidly strange as in this reckless corker of a debut feature written and directed by Karan Kandhari, and backed by Film4.We meet the newly hitched – that is, thrown together – Uma and Gopal on a train to their new marital home (a small hut) on the ragged edges of today’s Mumbai. She sits bolt upright in the carriage behind her wedding veil; he is slumped out cold beside her. The wedding night is equally indecorous. As she starts to undress, he hurtles out the door as if he’s seen a scorpion. It sets Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Chapter III: We Return to Light is an unashamedly gentle and soothing escape from a hectic world. The last in a travelogue triptych which has so far incorporated Anoushka Shankar’s influences from living in Europe and then California – this album returns to the source of her music and inspiration.Chapter III, however, is resolutely not buried in the traditional Indian sounds which were first brought to the attention of Western audiences by Anoushka’s father, Ravi. That said, there certainly are some classical Indian raga sounds in the mix with more modern melodies and tones, which rub up Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The railways that we built in India may be well known, but I bet you’ve never heard of the Customs Line, a hedge that stretched 2,500 miles across the subcontinent all the way from the River Indus to the border between Madras and Bengal – the distance between London and Istanbul. Comparable in scale to the great Wall of China, this 40-foot high barrier was created to prevent the smuggling of salt.Before the advent of refrigeration, salt played a crucial role in preserving food. Taxing a substance so essential for survival was a sure way of getting rich and the British East India Company was Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Once again, Glasgow’s annual winter festival of traditional music from all parts of the world is formed of an astonishingly packed programme of music, dance, trails and poetry in venues throughout the city. This year’s opening weekend saw two distinctly different orchestral concerts, each pushing the boundaries of what an orchestra can be.Returning to the Celtic Connections stage on Friday evening was Orchestral Qawwali Project with their signature blend of Sufi, Indian classical and western classical music. The two soloists – and the driving forces behind the ensemble – were magnetic Read more ...
Sarah Kent
If you suffer from lepidopterophobia, this film will either cure your fear of moths or push you over the edge. Warning: the screen is often filled with moths of every shape, size, colour and pattern while the sound of flapping, fluttering and girating wings fills the air to the point where you feel bombarded by the flying, furry creatures.Mansi Mungee is researching the prevalence of hawk moths in the Eastern Himalayas. With her assistant, Bicki (Gendan Marphew) from the local Bugun community, she sets up moth screens in various locations in the rainforest, then they sit and wait for the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Shoot, Jim, shooot!” Simon Callow does a fine impression of producer Ismail Merchant desperately trying to get director James Ivory to bring urgency to the proceedings.The received wisdom was that Ismael thought Jim was going to bankrupt Merchant Ivory Productions commercially by insisting on perfection, while Jim was sure that Ismael would bankrupt it artistically by insisting on every possible economy.Theirs was a volatile, complex relationship, as director Stephen Soucy’s honest, fascinating documentary, full of talking heads from the Merchant Ivory family, as they liked to call it - Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Payal Kapadia’s lyrical fiction feature debut All We Imagine as Light, which received the Grand Prix at Cannes in May, is now accruing end-of-year prizes. This week, the New York Film Critics Circle and the voters for the Gotham Awards (which honours independent movies) named it 2024’s Best International Film. More prizes will follow.All We Imagine as Light, which features dazzling night scenes, blends fiction and documentary. Opening on a near-vérité travelling sequence through the busy Dadar market in Mumbai, Kapadia’s birthplace, it swiftly broadens into the story of three women hospital Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Nothing and All at Once is the debut album from New Delhi electronica producer Jay Pei in his Panelia guise. Featuring a broad but seamless tapestry of electronica, beats and breaks, often with widescreen cinematic vibes, it veers from driving grooves to ambient atmospheres that seem marinated in leftfield 90s sounds.Tipped for great things by the likes of Mixmag Asia, Pei is hardly a newcomer to the electronica scene, having already released a good number of EPs in his own name. However, under his Panelia moniker, he has mined the sounds of maverick producers from just before the dawn of the Read more ...