Cannes 2025: Cannes Curtain Raiser — India shines on at Cannes 2025

After Payal Kapadia bagging the Grand Prix for All We Imagine As Light (AWIAL) at the Cannes Film Festival last year, India is back at cinema’s Kumbh Mela with a new contender in Neeraj Ghaywan’s second feature film Homebound, which is competing in the official Un Certain Regard segment this year. Ghaywan is competing with the likes of Kristin Stewart, Scarlett Johansson, and Harris Dickinson.

It marks a return to feature filmmaking for Ghaywan after a decade and also a comeback to Un Certain Regard in as many years. His debut feature Masaan played in the same section in Cannes 2015 and won the FIPRESCI critics prize and the Promising Future prize.

Unlike Kapadia’s international co-production, Ghaywan’s Homebound is a rare Indian outing at Cannes which is backed by a mainstream Bollywood studio, Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions, and features young Bollywood stars like Ishaan Khatter, Jahnavi Kapoor and Vishal Jethwa in the lead roles. It also promises to be replete with quintessentially Indian emotions and drama in its story-telling rather than drawing from the restrained European cinematic sensibility and ethos, the hallmark of the festival circuit. Johar confesses having cried when he read the script and again on watching the finished film which is about the ups and downs in the friendship of two young men and brings the disempowered in rural India to focus.

What’s most heartening is an icon like Martin Scorsese boarding Homebound as Executive Producer, the first time he is backing an original Indian film after having supported restoration of old classics like Uday Shankar’s Kalpana with Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s Film Heritage Foundation. Last, a world-renowned filmmaker associated with a young Indian filmmaker was Alfonso Cuaron on Chaitanya Tamhane’s second feature film, The Disciple (2020). 

Meanwhile, Kapadia continues her Cannes run, this time as one of the members of the main feature films competition jury, a section in which her own film had won the Grand Prix last year. French actress Juliette Binoche is the president of the jury and American actress Halle Berry, Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher, South Korean writer-director Hong Sangsoo, American actor Jeremy Strong, Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas, French-Moroccan writer Leila Slimani and filmmaker Dieudo Hamadi from Congo are the other jury members.

Her journey into Cannes has been pretty meteoric with Afternoon Clouds short film in 2017 and the documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing in 2021 and then AWIAL last year and jury member this year. A Night of Knowing Nothing was at the Directors' Fortnight stream at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, where it was named the winner of the L'Œil d'or award for Best Documentary Film.

Dungarpur, another regular at Cannes, has two restored classics that feature in the official Cannes lineup. Satyajit Ray’s 1970 film Aranyer Din Ratri will be presented with its actor Sharmila Tagore and American filmmaker Wes Anderson in attendance. Anderson has often quoted Ray’s cinema as a major influence, dedicated The Darjeeling Limited to the maestro and used music from Ray’s films for it. In an interview he had said: “Ray is one of my favourites. His films feel like novels to me. He draws you very close to his characters, and his stories are almost always about people going through a major internal transition. My favourites are the Calcutta trilogy of The Adversary (1970; Pratidwandi), Company Limited (1971; Seemabaddha), and The Middleman (1976; Jana Aranya), which are very adventurous and inventive stylistically, and Days and Nights in the Forest (1970; Aranyer Din Ratri), which completely captured my attention when I was a teenager, with soulful troublemakers as heroes. I think Charulata (1964; The Lonely Wife) is one of his most beautiful films, and also the Apu films.”

Dungarpur’s other restored film playing at Cannes is a 1978 Sri Lankan film, Gehenu Lamai (Girls) by Sumitra Peries.

Meanwhile, Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute of India’s (SRFTI) student film, a short about the strife of a young Nigerian footballer, called A Doll Made Up of Clay has been selected in the official La Cinef section, dedicated to school films. It has been written and directed by an Ethiopian student filmmaker Kokob Gebrehaweria Tesfay and produced by his fellow Indian student Sahil Manoj Ingle.

Meanwhile, another SRFTI graduate, Tribeny Rai’s debut feature film, Shape of Momo, produced by Kislay and Geeta Rai, which was selected for the Hong Kong - Asia Film Financing Forum (HAF) will be showcased under the Goes To Cannes initiative at the Cannes Film Market. Rai is from Sikkim and her Nepali language film is also set in her home state. Goes To Cannes, one of the tailor-made official programmes at Cannes Film Market, aims at discovering the promising, next-generation talents through their works-in-progress selected and curated by partner festivals.