Climate Change, Societal Ills, Mysticism Among Subjects Explored in South Asian Oscar Contenders

Naman Ramachandran
·3 min read
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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.

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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 2018 that devastated the southern Indian state of Kerala. The film is deeply personal in that it is also informed by Joseph’s own experiences of being trapped in the floods with his family. Featuring an all-star cast from the Kerala film industry, the film is the highest-grossing Malayalam-language film of all time. Joseph has also been actively reaching out to the Academy’s voters via PR and screenings.

From Bangladesh, “No Ground Beneath the Feet,” directed by debutant Mohammad Rabby Mridha, tackles the twin themes — both universal — of urban poverty and climate change. The film contrasts the stories of an ambulance driver in Dhaka, played by Mostafa Monwar, who won best performance at the 2016 Singapore International Film Festival for “Live from Dhaka,” and his wife, parents and two young children, who are on a delta in rural Bangladesh that is slowly shrinking because an ever-increasing river that surrounds it. The film debuted at Busan and subsequently played at the International Film Festival of India, Goa. “No Ground Beneath the Feet” is backed by Abu Shahed Emon, whose production “Sincerely Yours, Dhaka” and directorial debut, “Jalal’s Story,” were previous submissions in the category from Bangladesh. The country has yet to secure a nomination and Emon is hoping to change that.

Mongolia’s submission, Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir’s “City of Wind,” had a splashy debut at Venice’s Horizon strand, where it won best actor for Tergel Bold-Erdene. It went on to play at Pingyao, where it won the Robert Rossellini award for best director, and at Toronto and the AFI Fest. It follows Ze, a timid 17-year-old shaman who studies hard at school to succeed in the cold, callous society of modern Mongolia, while communing with his ancestral spirit to help those in his community. But when he encounters Maralaa, his senses are awakened and another reality seems possible. The film’s campaign will ride on the spate of ecstatic reviews, including Variety, which praised it as a “wise, precise and confident debut.”

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