The annual Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles is back with its 17th edition to offer an international showcase for Indian cinema. Twenty-five titles, including feature films, documentaries and shorts, will be screened at the festival between April 11 and April 14.
These include festival regulars such as Ritesh Batra’s Photograph and Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s Jonaki, as well as films that are being screened in North America for the first time.
The festival will open with Sriram Raghavan’s Andhadhun, as part of a tribute to actress Tabu. “Her work and personality embody everything that IFFLA is about – being fearless, versatile, independent in spirit, unwilling to compromise, brilliant in the range of her performances, and simply beautiful,” Christina Marouda, the festival’s executive director, said in a press note. Raghavan’s comedic thriller stars Tabu as the femme fatale Simi, who manipulates Ayushman Khurrana’s blind pianist after a murder gone wrong.
The line-up includes Ronny Sen’s debut film Cat Sticks, which examines the lives of brown sugar addicts in Kolkata, Safdar Rahman’s Chippa, about a boy’s quest for his estranged father through the streets of Kolkata, starring Lion actor Sunny Pawar, and Anamika Haksar’s Old Delhi drama Taking the Horse to Eat Jalebis.
The slate includes Ronak Shah’s Love Goes Through Your Mind, about the experiences of an Indian American family that implodes “under the pressures of a family member’s untreated mental illness”, Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam’s The Sweet Requiem, centred on Tibetan refugees in Delhi, and Praveen Morchhale’s Widow of Silence, which explores the lives of the half-widows of Kashmir – women who have lost their husbands to alleged state-enforced disappearances. Ukranian filmmaker Dar Gai’s Namdev Bhau In Search Of Silence, about a man who encounters a chatty 12-year-old while trying to escape to Ladakh to find peace and quiet, will also be screened.
The festival will also host the world premiere of the short films The Shaila(s) by Neha RT, Varun Chounal’s Youthful and Sakshi Gulati’s Neon. The other shorts in the line-up include Jayisha Patel’s documentary Circle, about a 13-year-old rape survivor who confronts her family over years of abuse, and Sandhya Suri’s The Field, which won the Best Short Film prize at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. Suri’s film traces efforts of a female agricultural worker who prepares for the annual harvest.
Shazia Iqbal’s Bebaak, Vikas Chandra’s Maya, Ashish Pandey’s Nooreh and Rishi Chandna’s Tungrus are also part of the lineup.
Corrects and clarifications: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described Ronny Sen’s Cat Sticks as the story of three heroin addicts in Kolkata. The error is regretted.