What caught me by surprise was that the film's depiction of Bombay* is so cynical, right from the beginning. Raj Kapoor first meets Dharmanand on the way to Bombay and is signalled that this is how people in the big city are: deceptive, greedy and selfish. When he finally does reach Bombay, the first person he speaks to, the beggar, gives him the crudest advice possible: to start begging because an educated, honest person won't find a job. It's so…

Cinema of necessity. Cinema born out of rubble.

It's insane to me how cinema thrives even in times of hopelessness. Sure, Germany had already left Rome in the spring of 1944. But the war was still on—people were still being killed. And yet, here are artists deciding in January of 1945 to shoot a film about dastardly occurrences in Nazi-occupied Italy. Boggles my mind that this—an informal record of the common man being a revolutionary—was being made while Hitler was…

There’s a scene in the middle of the first hour where Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) have a conversation inside their small house, ubiquitous in the city of Bombay, but Payal Kapadia and cinematographer Ranabir Das’ camera leaves them to themselves and instead roams the city. The camera lingers from the skyline on neighbouring buildings with their lit apartments, wide shots of the city with the metro trailing between buildings like a snake making its path through a…

I love that two trees stand tall in Ikkis, one in the courtyard of Dharmendra's ancestral home in Sargodha and the other in the once-battlefield of Basantar. Both trees get a special moment each in this film. The one in Sargodha has a binocular lens planted in its bark, something that Dharmendra's character had tucked into the tree as a kid so that he could, after years, be able to peek through the glass and see how the tree has…