The Journal
Essays & Dispatches
Long reads on the films, filmmakers and movements of meaningful Indian cinema.
Agraharathil Kazhuthai (1977)
Agraharathil Kazhuthai is John Abraham’s 1977 Tamil film, the only one he made in that language, follows a donkey adopted by a Brahmin professor, stoned to death by his village on a false charge and then worshipped as a deity, and closes with the funeral fire burning the settlement to the ground.
Ashadh Ka Ek Din (1971)
Ashadh Ka Ek Din (1971), based on Mohan Rakesh’s play of the same name, is Mani Kaul’s adaptation of the love triangle between Sanskrit poet Kalidasa, Mallika, and Priyangmanjari.
Vijeta (1982)
Vijeta (1982) is a coming-of-age Hindi drama directed by Govind Nihalani, tracing a young man’s passage into the Indian Air Force amid his parents’ fraught marriage.
Ijaazat (1987)
Ijaazat (1987) is Gulzar’s exquisitely poetic Hindi musical romance about an estranged couple (Naseeruddin Shah and Rekha) who unexpectedly reunite in a railway station waiting room five years after their divorce, tenderly excavating memories of their failed marriage and the other woman (Anuradha Patel) whose presence still lingers between them.
Dooratwa (1978)
Dooratwa (1978), Buddhadev Dasgupta’s debut feature, is a spare and poetically rendered Bengali drama — adapted from a Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay short story — that examines marital estrangement when a Kolkata professor discovers his young wife is pregnant by another man, winning the National Film Award for Best Bengali Feature Film.
Sparsh (1980)
Sparsh (1980) is Sai Paranjape’s tender Hindi drama about a fiercely independent blind principal (Naseeruddin Shah) of a school for the blind and a withdrawn widow (Shabana Azmi) who volunteers at the school, exploring how physical disability, pride, and insecurity become emotional barriers to love and human connection.
Black Friday (2004)
Black Friday (2004) is Anurag Kashyap’s documentary-style Hindi film, adapted from S. Hussain Zaidi’s book, that reconstructs the investigation into the 1993 Bombay serial bombings through a sprawling mosaic of perpetrators, policemen, and bystanders, offering a searing, unsentimental account of how the attacks were planned, executed, and unravelled.