If India were to improve on its remarkable success at the Cannes Film Festival last year, it would have to do nothing better than win the Palme d’Or.
However, with no Indian film in the prestigious competition section this year, Indian cinema’s Palme d’Or pursuit will have to wait. Honours could still come India’s way this year as the country is represented by a young filmmaker with a proven track record for winning awards in the French Riviera. (Also read: Payal Kapadia returns to the Cannes Film Festival 2025, this time as a jury member)
That filmmaker is Neeraj Ghaywan, whose sophomore feature film, Homebound, is part of Cannes festival’s Un Certain Regard section that celebrates fresh voices and trends in global cinema. Ghaywan’s debut film, Masaan, set in the ghats of Varanasi, had picked up two awards in Cannes in the same category exactly a decade ago.
Payal Kapadia on Palme d’Or jury
An Indian could still have a say in the presentation of the Palme d’Or this year. Mumbai-born director Payal Kapadia, who won the Cannes festival’s second-biggest award, the Grand Prix last year for All We Imagine As Nothing, is on the Cannes competition jury that decides the festival’s top prize.
Besides the Grand Prix for All We Imagine As Light, India had walked away with the top prize in the film schools section as well as Best Actress for Anasuya Sengupta in Un Certain Regard last year.
Kapadia, whose debut film A Night of Knowing Nothing picked up the Golden Eye Prize for the Best Documentary in Cannes in 2021, is joined on the jury by global cinema heavyweights like American actor Halle Berry and Hong Kong auteur Hong Sang-soo.
The competition jury is headed this year is acclaimed French actor Juliette Binoche, who hit the headlines at the festival in 2010 for crying uncontrollably during a press conference after learning Iranian director Jafar Panahi had begun a hunger strike in a Tehran jail where he was imprisoned for attempting to make a documentary on the election of the then president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Binoche was the lead actor in another Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami’s film Certified Copy, which was competing for the Palme d’Or that year.
A decade-and-half later, Panahi is in the Cannes competition himself, with his new feature film, A Simple Accident. Panahi, who won the Camera d’Or for the Best First Film of a Director in Cannes in 1995 for The White Balloon, is returning to the Croisette four years after contributing a short documentary, Life, on him and his family surviving the quarantine during the coronavirus pandemic in the anthology, The Year of the Everlasting Storm.
Previous members from India on the Cannes competition jury include Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy, actors Sharmila Tagore, Nandita Das and Deepika Padukone. One of them, Sharmila Tagore, will be present again in Cannes for the world premiere of the restored version of the 1970 Satyajit Ray film, Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest).
Wes Anderson to honour Satyajit Ray
Aranyer Din Ratri, recently restored in 4K resolution by the Martin Scorsese-founded The Film Foundation and India’s Film Heritage Foundation, is part of the Cannes Classics category, which this year also has restored prints of Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 film Gold Rush and iconic Mexican director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Amores Perros.
American filmmaker Wes Anderson, who sits on the board of Scorsese’s The Film Foundation, will honour Ray by presenting the newly-restored version of Aranyer in Cannes, in the presence of Sharmila Tagore and Purnima Dutta, the wife of the film’s producer Asim Dutta, who also produced other Ray films, Pratidwandi (1970) and Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969). Pratidwandi, another Ray film restored from ruins by the National Film Archive of India, Pune was part of the Cannes Classics three years ago.
“Anything signed by Satyajit Ray must be cherished and preserved; but the nearly-forgotten Days and Nights in the Forest is a special, particular gem. Made in 1970. Modern and novelistic,” says Anderson, the prolific American director of many surrealist films, who is vying for his first Palme d’Or this year for his new feature, The Phoenician Scheme, set in 1950 with yet another ensemble cast comprising Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Tom Hanks, Riz Ahmed, Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansoon and Benedict Cumberbatch.
“Ray worked in terrain perhaps more familiar to (John) Cassavetes. A clash, negotiation between castes and sexes. Urbans and rurals. Selfish men and their hopes and cruelties and spectacular lack of wisdom. Women who see through them. The great Soumitra Chatterjee: lost but searching. The great Sharmila Tagore: mysterious, cerebral, mesmerising. From the master, another masterpiece,” adds Anderson in a statement released by the Film Heritage Foundation.
“Aranyer Din Ratri is such a contemporary film that I know it will resonate with new audiences across the world even today,” says Sharmila Tagore. “I remember I was shooting for Aradhana when Manikda (Ray) approached me to shoot for this film for a month at a stretch. It was incredibly hot during the shoot and we could only shoot in the mornings and late afternoons,” she adds.
Ghaywan returns with sophomore feature
Ghaywan’s debut film, Masaan, which won Un Certain Regard’s Most Promising Future Prize in 2015, along with the International Film Critics’ Prize, was an independent production. Among the producers of Masaan were Anurag Kashyap and Guneet Monga. Homebound, Ghaywan’s second feature film, shifts its production process to the corporate realm. The film is produced by Dharma Productions currently owned by Karan Johar and Adar Poonawalla.
Homebound, the story of two friends (Ishan Khatter and Vishal Jethwa) from a North Indian village pursuing police jobs seeking dignity, also stars Janhvi Kapoor and found backing by Scorsese, an executive producer of the film. Un Certain Regard section, which also screened Masaan, this year has raw talent in the form of debut directorial ventures of American actors Kristen Stewart (The Chronology of Water) and Scarlett Johansson (Eleanor The Great).
Story of Kolkata’s seven-a-side football
Homebound and Aranyer are joined in Cannes, being held from May 13 to 24, by a short film produced by the state-run Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI), Kolkata. A Doll Made Up of Clay, directed by SRFTI’s international student Kokob Gebrehaweria Tesfay, an Ethiopian national, tells the heartrending tale of struggling African footballers in India. Set in the backdrop of Kolkata’s popular seven-a-side football, Tesfay’s 24-minute film focuses on the real-life story of Ibrahim Ahmed, a footballer from Nigeria playing in Kolkata, whose life goes upside down after picking up injuries and unable to send money back home.
“I wanted to portray the problems of African migrants in India as a Black African myself,” says Tefsay, a student of direction and script writing at SRFTI. “I met many Africans playing football in Kolkata. Most of them playing in the low-paid leagues face anxiety, fear and identity crisis. Not many of them can afford to pay rent or go to hospital when they are injured and not playing,” he adds. “I wanted to be a voice for these people.”