Sex, truth and videotape

The second annual London Indian Film Festival pulls the sheets off India’s hidden characters, says Michael Edison Hayden

A Leering gangster contemplates Ruth, a frightened Mumbai prostitute, from a soft leather chair. He has just slapped her and taken her money as pay back for debts owed by her drug-addict boyfriend.“Very hard money, I know,” he jeers. He jerks his wrist in a mimed hand-job.“Hey, very hard.”

It isn’t exactly Bollywood. That scene is from Anurag Kashyap’s That Girl In Yellow Boots, one of many cutting-edge independent Indian films that will be screened at the second annual London Indian Film Festival, which runs from June 30 to July 12. LIFF’S 2011 line-up builds on the success of its debut last year, which was half-jokingly called the “punk rock” of Indian film festivals, or as British newspaper the Guardian put it, “grown-up” Bollywood.

“I think Hindi commercial cinema will always have an audience,” says Cary Sawhney, the festival’s creative and executive director, who enjoys the “punk rock” label. “(But) the films winning the hearts and minds of new generations are cheaper to make, and much less constrained by the need to please the masses.”

LIFF’s mission is to showcase directors working off the well-beaten Bollywood path, in what could be termed the second wave of parallel cinema. Directors like Dibakar Banerjee, Srijit Mukherji and Anurag Kashyap are among the leading architects of a fresh cinematic challenge to Bollywood’s conventions: gritty, true-to-life storytelling over escapism, created with a comparatively microscopic budget and no major stars - but thats not the only criterion. Opening the festival this year is Aamir Khan's adult comedy Delhi Belly starring Imran Khan (See our exclusive interview with co-star Poorna Jagannathan) - a film that can well fall under commercial cinema but yet be a part of the burgeoning era of entertainment that goes beyond song and dance.

“When That Girl In Yellow Bootswas screened (in India), some were offended, and a lady from the censor board thought I needed psychiatric help,” Kayshap says. “Indian audiences think I’m too dark and push too much, whereas when the film was screened at the Venice Film Festival last year, fellow directors said I held back too much. So, my morality is caught between two (worlds).”

For Sawhney, the LIFF serves as a refuge for “taboo” material like that shown in Kayshap’s films, but also as a platform for new perspectives that are fascinating to Western audiences, who are more curious than ever about the intimate inner life of an emerging power.

This year’s festival includes Rituparno Ghosh’s Just Another Love Story, about two generations of gay lovers, and Ketan Mehta’s Rang Rasiya, about the sensual relationship between painter Raja Ravi Varma and his muse - two films any Indian who tires of the unnatural projection of sexuality in Bollywood should watch.

“Sex and sexuality is probably the last frontier in India,” says Sawhney. “In many ways I think our festival has captured the zeitgeist of emerging new Indian cinema, and this is reflected in the fact that we are drawing a younger crowd. Just over half our audience are South Asians,” Sawhney says. “The other part of the audience consists of mostly Caucasian Brits who feel aesthetically excluded from Bollywood but are nevertheless keen to see new images from around India.”

With or without make-up, the masked faces of Indian life are about to be revealed.