The trailer of Ritesh Batra’s Photograph reveals Nawazuddin Siddiqui as a photographer desperate to avoid marriage. Rafi takes photographs of tourists at the Gateway of India in Mumbai. He passes off a woman he sees regularly, Miloni (Sanya Malhotra), as his lover Noori to his grandmother. A bond develops between Rafi and the shy Miloni. Is it love, or, given the Mumbai setting, a transactional relationship with the promise of mutual benefit?

Photograph was premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and was also screened at the Berlin Film Festival. The Hindi-language movie will be released in India on March 15. Also in the cast are Sachin Khedekar, Geetanjali Kulkarni, Robin Das, Jim Sarbh, Denzil Smith and Farrukh Jaffar as the grandmother.

Ritesh Batra made his feature film debut in 2013 with the epistolary romance The Lunchbox, starring Irrfan, Nimrat Kaur and Nawazuddin Siddiqui. Batra has since worked in Hollywood, directing Jim Broadbent and Charlotte Rampling in The Sense of an Ending (2017) and Robert Redford and Jane Fonda in Our Souls at Night (2018). His upcoming projects include A Letter From Rosemary Kennedy, a biopic of American President John F Kennedy’s sister Rosemary that will star Elisabeth Moss (The Handmaid’s Tale).

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Photograph (2019).

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