“Daddy, what is the Indian government?”. “I am.”. In Irfana Majumdar’s first feature film we observe a recently independent India from a garden, a backyard, bedrooms, a kitchen and the dinner table of the local chief of government-police’s house (ostensibly full of servants). A falsely naive way to expose the different chains of servitude and the rules of a social game where everyone, including the mother (scrupulously interpreted by the director), has a place in a precise hierarchy. Little Anjana is left, at her age of questions and fairies, and her talent for writing and her capacity for wonder (that remind us of Madhabi Mukherjee’s swinging in Satyajit Ray’s Charulata) thrive thanks to her relationship with Shankar the servant. A political fable of a country desirous to dream itself without seeing the paternalistic and classist fetters that model its reality. AR
French Premiere
