This year’s programme presents an exciting mix of wide-ranging content and formats, in features, documentaries, animation, shorts, and a web-series. Anurag Kashyap’s ‘Manmarziyaan’ (Husband Material) will close the festival.
Founded in 2001, River to River is the only festival in Italy completely focused on Indian Cinema and is held annually in Florence with carefully curated film screenings, Q&As with crew and actors, and a multitude of side events. Director Rohena Gera will be in attendance for her debut ‘Sir’, an Indo-France co-production, which won the Gan Foundation Award for distribution at the 2018 Cannes’ Critics Week and opens River to River. The film is about love that transcends insurmountable class barriers between Ashwin (Vivek Gomber), a man of wealth, and Ratna (Tillotama Shome) who works as his domestic live-in help. ‘Sir’ will release in Italian cinemas in 2019.
Stories by and on women are centre-stage. The festival will showcase the first two episodes of the web-series ‘Bisht, Please!’, which follows Neetu Bisht, whose life is a balancing act between following convention and standing up for her beliefs. She personifies the travails of almost every girl in today’s India. One of the pioneers of online entertainment in the country, The Viral Fever (TVF) Network is the producer. Los Angeles-based Jeremy Guy’s documentary ‘Purdha’ (India, USA) tells the story of a young Indian woman who trades her burka for the dream of playing on the Mumbai senior women’s cricket team. Ravi Jadhav’s ‘Chitra’ (Nude) is on a woman who migrated to Mumbai and is compelled by circumstances to become a nude model at an art school. The closing film, Anurag Kashyap's 'Manmarizyaan' follows a spirited girl, Rumi (Taapsee Pannu), caught in a complicated love triangle between a disc jockey (Vickey Kaushal) and Robbie, a London-raised Indian (Abhishek Bachchan), pressurised by family and society, seeking love in today's fast-paced world.
A special treat is Franz Osten’s ‘Shiraz’ (1928), the ravishing, romantic tale behind the creation the Taj Mahal, shot entirely on location in India. River to River will screen a recent restoration by the British Film Institute National Archive, which features a commissioned score by Grammy-awardee Anoushka Shankar.
Bollywood makes its presence felt with three titles. Atul Manjrekar’s ‘Fanney Khan’ stars Anil Kapoor, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, and Rajkumar Rao, in a comedy where a father pins his unfulfilled dreams of becoming a singer on his daughter, taking her to singing contests where the girl struggles to belt out a tune. Irrfan Khan, Mithila Palkar, Dulquer Salmaan star in Akarsh Khurana’s ‘Karwaan’ on a man’s eventful and hilarious journey from Bangalore to Kochi to collect his father’s dead body, accompanied by two unlikely co-passengers. Anubhav Sinha’s critically acclaimed ‘Mulk’ is a courtroom drama on a Muslim family in Varanasi accused of colluding with the planning of a terrorist attack. Defending them in court is their Hindu daughter-in-law. The film stars Rishi Kapoor, Taapsee Pannu, and Ashutosh Rana.
Other highlights are Kireet Khurana’s ‘T for Taj Mahal’ on a highway eatery that doubles up as school taught by the visiting customers; two packages of four short films each, featuring Yash Sawant’s Locarno selection ‘A Cold Summer Night’; and Martin Ponferrada’s ‘Everything is Upstream’ (Australia, Philippines, Korea, Thailand, Tibet, China) an animated short documentary exploring the dreams of some Buddhist monks.
For the entire programme: http://www.rivertoriver.it/en/prtr2018