In cinema sometimes less is more and this rings even more true for animation. Most blockbuster animation films market themselves as being hyper-realistic, but often only provide lacklustre results. Animation works at its best with a clear stylistic vision. Miyakazi's Spirited Away looks completely different from Up. Both are great films in their own right and that is the flexibility of the medium. Geetanjali Rao has done the same with her hand painted animation film.<br>

<h2>'Bombay Rose' has wonderfully used Indian pulp magazine art, comics and vintage movie posters for reference points for Mumbai, painting the landscapes and figures with blurred lines while keeping the characters' features sharp and well defined. Shadows and depths are painted religiously, frame by frame. Some sequences even find inspiration in folk art and Mughal art of miniatures and side portraits. </h2>

The stylistic choices give the film a look that is groundbreaking in Indian animation. It oozes the flavour of Mumbai in a manner that an amalgamation of different cultures becomes a towering presence in the narrative. The soundtrack features songs from Goan music, groovy and erratic, juxtaposed against a Hindi heartland ballad invoking Maa Rewa(Narmada) on a modern rendition. <br/><br/>


The film revolves around three characters, Shellie D'Souza, Kamala and Salim who are tied together by, among other things, a rose. The brilliantly chosen characters allow an exploration of different parts of Mumbai.
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Miss D'Souza clings to a glorious past. She reminisces a retro Bollywood film she starred in with the love of her life. Her memories are haunted by the days far gone. Piece by piece, she pawns her invaluable relics that no one really buys. Her narrative progresses to reveal that even her house is a symbol of the city's past - a garden where fresh flowers grow only to reach a graveyard.
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These flowers find Salim, a migrant with a tragic past, and then Kamala. Both are outsiders who come to the city, the land of opportunity, seeking escape from a terrible life. Similar to countless other films, they find themselves stuck in the city's ugly underbelly. This interaction between the old and the new isn't merely black and white. As dance bars are replaced by high-end clubs where dancers continue to get trafficked, vices of the past persevere for an existence in the present.
<h2>All three characters come from different religions and social strata. Their stories coalesce into a larger picture of a city's consciousness - one that is dying and rejuvenating at the same time. </h2>

Miss D'Souza is a doomed romantic who walks through the streets as we see them returning to how they looked in previous decades. Salim and Kamala often find respite from their mundane daily lives through fantasy and escapism. Salim seeks solace in movies and imagining himself in legends of heroes; Kamala fantasises about being a rich bride in the Mughal era. 

<h2>As these fantasies exist in the world of crime and moral degeneration, one as real as the other, Gitanjali Rao fluently moves from fantasy to reality, often blurring the line between the two and splashing paint all over the screen. </h2>

The screenplay is tight with the visuals threaded together so fluently as if they are a part of one gigantic canvas, where colours dictate the cuts, not a camera. The narrative moves freely from the story to fantasies or extended sequences with roses to dance numbers.
The real achievement of the film, however, is the homage it is able to pay to Indian cinema, to Mumbai and to the diverse people who inhabit it. <br><br>

<b><i>Written by <span class="text-gradient">Nimish K Sharma</span></i></b>


Bombay Rose | Anurag Kashyap, Gitanjali Rao

There are days when life is doleful and unsatisfying and there is indeed nothing that can lift your spirits. On days like those, take refuge in art, particularly in a product like Yesterday and allow it to uplift you like nothing else. <br><br> This wonderfully written short film, shot in the most beautiful manner, will remind you that the pain of yesterday is precisely where it belongs - in the past. It will take you deep into the realms of attraction, love, heartbreak, separation, hurt and to love again, because what else can we be sure of if not the cyclical nature of life? The short film will involve you to the point where the boundaries between the self and the characters will blur. You will be with them during their highs and lows and at the end of it all, find yourself smiling again. The film will leave you with hope - to either treat it with carelessness or to hold on to it safely for a rainy day.

Yesterday | Short Film of the Day

Gubbare is one the 10 short films from the 2007 Anthology Dus Kahaaniyan. It stars Rohit Roy and Anita Hassanandani as the newly-wed couple fighting over trivial things on a bus journey. Nana Patekar's acting chops are on display here, as he plays the elderly guy who brings 'gubbare' for his beloved, and schools the young couple.

Gubbare | Short Film of the Day

First person documentaries are usually a reflection of the director's idiosyncrasies. They blur the lens
between the observer and the creator. While a third-person documentary would document and let the
camera tell a story, a first person narrative reminds you that you are seeing the film from the
director's perspective. 
<h2>About Love, the latter of the two, is a sincerely heartwarming film that flows like a breeze from start to finish. There is
never a dull moment in a narrative that captures a regular Marathi Brahmin family in their
daily lives. Director Archana Phadke has documented her family in the lead up to her
brother's wedding, trying to explore love in its mundane, overlooked, day-to-day form. </h2>

Love in a family is often never expressed through words, but conveyed through actions.
The mother takes care of the father's eccentricities. The grandmother, who has been married to
her husband for decades, quips that she follows him around all day for the 'sake of humanity'.
The grandchildren irritate the grandfather for fun, but also take care of his medicines. <br><br>
The film documents a family which is dysfunctional, but bound together in a sort of permanence
that only a family allows. Couples firmly believe in "until death do us part". While siblings
banter, the grandparents hurl abuses at each other constantly. <h2>Through all the
nagging, bickering and dad-jokes that land extremely well, a story about love is
documented through the eyes of the director.</h2>
Phadke has a background in filmmaking which is probably why she chose the medium for its intimate nature. Her
filmmaking abilities keep this film smooth, with well-framed shots and the house taking
up a life of itself.The residence has been around since 1901, we are told. A shot composed
of the grandmother, mother and the director herself with the camera standing on three different floors, one
above the other, conveys that the story is not simply confined to a single generation. <br><br>
The film is at its most subtle and mesmerising when it draws the character portraits of
the mother and the grandmother. The mother wears a smile on her face and lifts the house on
her shoulders. She yearns for two things - peace of mind and to be able to write, both of which
continue to evade her. She longs for comfort and recognition as she reads excerpts from her stories, always willing to explain her motifs and themes. She plans to write about love, about 'two
women separated by time' and comments on the nature of the relationship of Radha and
Krishna.<br><br>
The grandmother is from a different time. As she grows old, she becomes one with the house,
alone in a structure too big for her. She clings to memories from her past as her children and
grandchildren grow up and move on. <br><br>
There is a discussion on misogyny to be had, and the nature of love that women learn to give in to
marriage. Both the women form a real life tragedy that everyone is familiar with, all the while
maintaining the beauty of everyday relatability and light-heartedness. With its jovial quips as
well as deep conversations, About Love becomes a film that stays and deeply affects the viewer.<br/><br/>
<b><i>Written by <span class="text-gradient">Nimish K Sharma</span></i></b>  

About Love | Review | Archana Atul Phadke

The film is a wonderful take on the various aspects of love - thrill, cheating, stability and boredom - from the point of a view of a housewife in a middle-class, nineties household. The narrative does a notable job of using a mundane object, a pressure cooker, to comment on the dynamics of a marriage. <br><br> Swati, who feels neglected by her husband, while also struggling with an old pressure cooker, finds herself considering different options and newer alternatives. She soon finds herself tempted by an automatic pressure cooker, a fancier product of an era that was beginning its tryst with modernisation. However, between temptation of novelty and the stability of familiarity, what will she choose?

Pressure cooker | Pallavi Joshi, Mukul Chadda | Short Film of the Day

Kheer is a short film about two generations, a child and her grandfather, and the way they look at love and relationships. It opens with an irritated man, played most convincingly by Anupam Kher, quarrelling with a woman. The intimacy of the quarrel suggests that the two are married. <br><br> The narrative then introduces two more characters, a girl and a boy, Kher's grandchildren. The surprise of these two characters is used most intelligently to reveal that she's indeed not his wife. The short film earns brownie points for the manner in which it navigates around the concepts of companionship and age. It also attempts to normalise the idea that age and the desire to be with someone are two unrelated things. Therefore they should not be judged using this non-existent link as an index.

Kheer | Short Film of the Day

Gamak Ghar’s charm lies in its simplicity, its ability to stick to the very basics of filmmaking,
showing what the medium is truly capable of, even in its most elemental form. It is like making sushi. How much flavour can you possibly derive from raw fish and
steamed rice with a few drops of a bland sauce? Enough to rule the world. However, when it comes to art, we might need more than just sauce.<br><br>
Achal Mishra, a twenty-three-year-old debutant director, might be walking towards that coveted mastery. His
film reminds one of the monk-like tranquility of Yasujiro Ozu’s films. There is a surety to his craft. The bare, most conventional elements that the masters of cinema have played with are
used innovatively and appropriately in his narrative.


<h2>Gamak Ghar is the story of a family during three different time periods (spanning two decades) and the way 
they come together in their ancestral home for important family functions.</h2>

It is a house built by a man mythologized in the first time frame (1998) itself. He was a playwright, and a respected
resident of a small village in Bihar. His simply yet elegantly constructed house now sees his
grandchildren play hide and seek in its nook and corners, while the memory of his death looms large over their
parents’ memories. <br><br>
The film is as much about the house itself as the family. Its progression through the decades is
harrowing, from a lively place full of light and life, to a gloomy, deteriorating shell of itself. The family
members move out one by one, some die and the house, which represents the roots of the family, slowly withers away with the passage of time. <br><br> Foundations laid by the grandfather lose their strength.
The subsequent generations seek out a new life and foundations elsewhere. Places, much like people, often die of natural causes, finally embracing their end when and after they are remembered for a last time. 
<h2>The narrative is also about progression of memories. Recent memories are often vivid, and induce
immediate emotions. The further they go from us, the more visceral they become. Some emotions
become nostalgia and acquire a strange sense of dreaminess that belongs to neither the present nor
the past. </h2> They are as much imagination as remembrance. Their records are found in old
cases catching pests and rotting with time. Their impact remains poignant. Eventually the bittersweet moments become afterthoughts that one carries in the back of their mind, but unable to ever express them out loud. <br><br>
The film is brilliant in its simplicity. Anand Bansal, the
cinematographer, austerely uses frozen frames in confined spaces, meticulously fixing his
shots to perfection. The use of aspect ratios as a storytelling device works splendidly (the
aspect ratio goes wider with every time frame, as the family spreads out to different areas, and
as there is more emptiness in the house to cover). Brilliantly directed, the earlier shots are
tighter, more focused and filled with people. The wide frames accentuate the emptiness of
the house in the latter parts. Natural elements like fog, darkness and dust are used in their
tradition sense. <h2>Certain shots are used again and again, each time with the house in a different
condition, to show the passing of time. It captures corridors, verandahs, and tulsi plants that die
and are born again in the same pot after decades. </h2>
There are themes and motifs to be found throughout the film, like in the subtleties of real human
behaviour. A cast of actors and non-actors are left to their devices to compose scenes in an
extremely authentic fashion while the camera acts as the eyes of the walls.
The excellence of Gamak Ghar is in many things. However what makes it truly special is the universal
story it so convincingly tells, and the simplistic mastery of craft it uses to tell it.

 <br/><br/>
<b><i>Written by <span class="text-gradient">Nimish K Sharma</span></i></b>  

Gamak Ghar | Review | Achal Mishra

Dry Day is a modern take on frail father-son relationships, and how little gestures can go a long way in mending them. Shashank Arora and Shishir Sharma are both brilliant as the loner young son and the awkward sweet father respectively. This short film will surely leave you with a smile.

Dry Day | Short Film of the Day

The music video juxtaposes the highs and lows of love for a couple which is drowning in the intensity of its own emotions. With the magical vocals of Prateek Kuhad, the song becomes a very poignant take on romance which is fierce, passionate and sometimes, heartbreaking. <br><br> Following in the footsteps of many artists before him, a recent example being that of Ed Sheeran, Kuhad also makes a cameo in the video. With the depiction of the cyclical nature of relationships, Cold/Mess makes the viewer conclude that though love can be overwhelming, suffocating and bitter, it's also tangy and sweet and something worth a try, much like a lemon tart.

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