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In its 19th the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival looks set to live up to its mission statement: To put the spotlight on local and international cinema that doesn't stick to prescribed ideas of filmmaking. Over the next week, you'll have the chance to watch 220 films in 51 languages from 49 countries, showing across 19 screens in the city, including the quaint art deco single-screen theatres Regal and Liberty. The MAMI Mumbai Film Festival includes films of all size, make and origin - from big-budget, star-studded features to indies, documentaries and shorts. There are special tribute showcases for Om Puri and Monica Bellucci; a spotlight on films in rare vernacular languages; and a segment of Marathi films to spotlight an industry at its peak. And there's the choicest selection of international films; including these 15 fine expressions worthy of the big screen experience - the tough stuff that will probably not turn up in theatres here after this week.
Mother!
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
From the director of the highly-acclaimed Black Swan, comes another insane psychological horror film, this time with Jennifer Lawrence taking the lead. Married to Javier Bardem, host to unwanted guests in Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeifer (among others) and, significantly, childless, here's another character primed for melodramatic disintegration.
Most Beautiful Island
Directed by Ana Asensio
Spanish actor Ana Asensio turns director and writer with a semi-autobiographical film based on her experience of living in New York City. Said experience, however, is not at all what you'd imagine for an actress living in NYC - none of that Brooklyn hipster-life or long Sunday brunches at Sasabune for this illegal immigrant trying to scrape together a living as an artiste in the Big Apple. When she agrees to stand in for a friend's 'freelance' assignment, she stumbles into a 'dangerous' game that involves big money and beautiful people. The film won the top prize at SXSW earlier this year.
Quest
Directed by Jonathan Olshefski
A documentary filmed over the course of eight years - the golden Obama years - takes us through the daily lives, struggles and achievements of one African-American family (the Raineys) living in Philadelphia. Suffused with a rare degree of empathy and warmth, this is the real-life story about the black American Dream, bracketed inside two significant presidential campaigns.
68 Kill
Directed by Trent Haaga
'Bad people doing awful things' will always make for a riotous time on screen, but Trent Haaga - whose last directorial venture was the macabre Chop - takes the idea to a whole new level with this black comedy. Chip is smitten with his girlfriend, the uber-hot Liza, enough to go to the ends of the world for her. Which includes robbing their landlord, during which Liza kills, maims and slaughters with an inordinate amount of pleasure. This is #relationshipgoals red-pill'd.
Meatball Machine Kodoku
Directed by Yoshihiro Nishimura
What's a film festival without a little gore? And of course, when you say gore you think Japanese sci-fi. It's a simple plot - parasitic aliens called Necroborgs descend upon a Tokyo-like city and convert its citizens into murder machines. Yes there is a sad protagonist, afflicted by cancer, at its centre. But Nishimura, who's known best for Hell Driver, goes in deep on the bizarre: blood sprays, bullets flying out of breasts, flesh flying everywhere as if humans were being put through a food processor. A suggestion: Don't bother with the popcorn.
24 Frames
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
The Iranian auteur's posthumous film is as experimental as anything else you can pick off his filmography - Close Up (1990) and Like Someone in Love (2012). Quite simply, it's an expression of Kiarostami's fascination with photography and wondering what happens before and after a frame has been captured. And so you have 24 shorts, if you will, snippets of life fictionalised on a green screen; including a pair of lions mating, ducks ushering a motorboat out of the scene; seagulls being hunted mid-flight. It might sound random on paper but you'll find the beauty and enigma when you share in Kiarostami's gaze.
Based on a True Story
Directed by Roman Polanski
A best-selling novelist (Emmanuelle Seigner) has reached some sort of a stalemate in her life despite her fabulous circumstances. But then, a strange admirer (the lovely Eva Green) turns up who seems to be the only one who really 'gets' her. This is, of course, just a deceit, and things steadily head into a downward spiral for our famous author. This French film is, reportedly, every bit as thrilling as the great Rosemary's Baby.
Blade of the Immortal
Directed by Takashi Miike
In the controversial Japanese director's 100th film, we get a jaded, immortal Samurai who sounds like the Wolverine of Logan, slices through his enemies like he was holding a lightsaber and harboring enough drive for justice to defeat the DC squad in one fell swoop. His job here is to help a young woman avenge the murder of her parents, and he gets into it with all the gusto of the entire band of 19th century vigilantes of 13 Assassins.
Caniba
Directed by Verena Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Find fact stranger and far more fascinating than fiction? This documentary by the duo behind 2012's shocking Leviathan is just the thing for you. For 90 minutes, you're in the company of Japanese cannibal Issei Sagawa whose crimes came to light in 1981, after he was arrested in Paris for the murder of his classmate Renee Hartevelt (and that charge being the least of the other unmentionable things he did to her corpse). But wait, there's more: Sagawa, declared unfit for trial, shipped himself back to Japan where he's lived off his notoriety ever since. It's a bizarre trip to watch this guy look directly into the camera, talking of illicit desires - or skirt the issue.
Dina
Directed by Dan Sickles, Antonio Santini
Here's a documentary that sounds like it could've been a YA bestseller-turned-global-blockbuster - and yet, finally, a very real story that might cut quite close to the bone. A film about the relationship between a man with Asperger Syndrome and a woman with multiple 'disorders', Dina takes the humane route, and that means wondering about more than how 'differently-abled' people 'do it'.
Loving Vincent
Directed by Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman
You've probably heard the big deal about this animated feature - every frame is hand-painted. A tribute to the great artist Vincent Van Gogh, re-imagining the last phase of his life and the theory that he did not actually commit suicide.
Manifesto
Directed by Julian Rosefeldt
Not strictly a new film - Manifesto released in 2015 - but this arthouse film stays fresh, largely due to Cate Blanchett's impressive rendition of 13 regular people from different points of time in history making declarations on their political, artistic and personal agenda. Why Blanchett? She played Bob Dylan once; she could play the world. And she does.
The Other Side of Hope
Directed by Aki Kaurismaki
From the Finnish director of the Oscar nominated The Man Without A Past (2003) and more recently, Le Havre (2011), comes more sharp comedy in this story of a budding restauranteur befriending a Syrian refugee from Aleppo who meet on a boat to Finland. Absurd and delightful, Kaurismaki's narrative steers clear of undermining The Issue, by underlining the paradoxes of life.
The Square
Directed by Ruben Ostlund
Elisabeth Moss, she of esoteric tastes, is in a Swedish satire playing a PR rep for Christian (Dominic West), a curator at the Stockholm Palace (now an art museum), who is at his wits end because his mobile phone has gone missing and there's a big show coming up. Because who'd mind a sly dig at the high snobiety of the art world?
Felicite
Directed by Alain Gomis
The Franco-Senegalese director who helmed Today has now trained his eye on a single mother, a vocal virtuoso who is the star at a bar she performs regularly at. But that's pretty much the only time she's on a pedestal: The rest of her days are a shitstorm, particularly now that her teenager is in the hospital and she is in need of more money. Stylish and poetic, Felicite is like watching La La Land in Lewis Carroll's looking glass.
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