The year didn’t lack drama – or tragedy, as the case may be. Here are the top stories of 2024 from The Reel.

From the short-sighted decision to pick Laapataa Ladies over All We Imagine as Light to the far-sighted commandeering of Bollywood talent for propaganda purposes, the year didn’t lack drama – or tragedy, as the case may be. Here are the biggest stories of 2024, some of which are still unravelling.

Payal Kapadia won over Cannes…

One of the year’s most endearing images was from May 23, the day Payal Kapadia won the Cannes Film Festival’s Grand Prix (Grand Jury) award for All We Imagine as Light. Grinning ear to ear along with her equally ecstatic cast, Kapadia signalled her arrival in global cinema with a movie that equalled the other titles at Cannes in its virtuosity.

Kapadia’s achievement cannot be overstated. Although an Indo-French co-production, her film is set in Mumbai and the Konkan and is mostly in Malayalam, while tapping into a global storytelling aesthetic.
The Film and Television Institute alumnus was the first female Indian director to be selected for the prestigious Competition section at Cannes. She made history as the first ever Indian to win the Grand Prix.

…But didn’t impress the committee selecting India’s Oscar entry

The one lot that Kapadia’s debut feature didn’t impress was the Film Federation of India committee selecting India’s entry for the Best International Film category at the Oscars. The FFI instead picked Kiran Rao’s cute but patently weaker Laapataa Ladies.

The 13-member jury headed by director Jahnu Barua, apart from proving that it wasn’t au courant with global tastes, further set itself for ridicule with a tone-deaf justification of its choice.
By declaring that “Indian women are a strange mixture of submission and dominance”, the panel came off as deeply patronising in its understanding of what constitutes a feminist film.

Unsurprisingly, Laapataa Ladies was not shortlisted. Meanwhile, All We Imagine As Light has won many more prizes since Cannes, apart from bagging first-ever nominations for an Indian film at several award shows.

The propaganda juggernaut rolls on

Another striking image this year was of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and key members of his Cabinet, including Amit Shah and Rajnath Singh, avidly watching The Sabarmati Report.
The film was among a handful of instances of sarkari cinema – pro-government productions that extol the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s Hindutva ideology, policies and political campaigns, especially towards Muslims.

The Sabarmati Report stars Vikrant Massey as a television network journalist who claims to have unearthed a cover-up of the “truth” about the death of 59 pilgrims on the Sabarmati Express in Godhra in 2002.
The blaze, which the state government blamed on Muslims, led to one of the worst communal riots in post-independent India. In the film, Massey’s journalist is sacked by his channel and hounded for revealing that the fire was a conspiracy, rather than an accident.

Dheeraj Sarna’s movie wasn’t the only one seeking to put a sarakri spin on recent events. In 2024, several propagandist films were released in cinemas, including Article 370, Bastar: The Naxal Story, Swatantrya Veer Savarkar and Jahangir National University.
These films mirrored the BJP’s worldview with varying degrees of success. Among them, Article 370 was a box office success too, suggesting that slickly made and persuasively argued sarkari filmmaking is here to stay.

Also read:

‘The Sabarmati Report’ and the future of sarkari cinema

A dummy’s guide to propaganda films in Bollywood

The crisis in Bollywood

Bollywood bent in other ways too. Nearly every prominent member of the country’s biggest language industry marked attendance at one of the most gargauntuan weddings the country has seen. Numerous A-listers attended the nuptials of Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant, adding glamour to an already glittering affair.

Yet, Bollywood had little to celebrate. The pandemic-era anxiety about dwindling ticket sales for expensive films has continued even after the return of normalcy. Original films that were not tied to a franchise or remade from another language struggled to recover their costs.

This year’s biggest Hindi-language blockbuster was a sequel (Stree 2) and a follow-up originally made in Telugu (Pushpa 2 – The Rule). The other hits were threequels (Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3, Singham Again). One of the top grossers was a remake of a Gujarati film (Shaitaan).

Among the outliers was the original comedy Crew. The biggest surprise in terms of low expectations and high returns was Munjya, although it did emanate from the Stree horror-comedy universe.

With rumours of budget cutbacks and skittishness over greenlighting potentially risky projects, the Hindi film industry is facing headwinds it is ill-equipped to handle.
Habituated to lavish productions that include huge fees for actors, Bollywood finds itself in the uncomfortable position of submissiveness to an aggressive Central government, embarrassment over the success of non-Hindi creators, and annoyance over having to curb its extravagant practices.

The Hema committee report’s truth bombs

In August, the equivalent of a nuclear bomb was dropped on Kerala. The Justice Hema Committee report’s findings on sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the state’s film industry ripped the covers off unjust and unlawful behaviour towards women.

The committee was constituted by the Kerala government in 2017 on the urging of the Women in Cinema Collective group. The trigger was the horrific abduction and assault of a leading actress, allegedly on the orders of the actor Dileep.

The report’s findings revealed rampant sexual harassment, illegal labour practices (such as the denial of basic facilities to junior artists and technicians) and the existence of a “mafia group” with uncontrolled power over actors or filmmakers.
The report led to public accusations and legal complaints against prominent figures, as well as demands for similar such studies in other film industries.

Also read:

Interview: What the Kerala film industry needs to do to fix its problems

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