Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s classic movie Elippathayam and Geetu Mohandas’s Moothon (The Elder One) will be shown at this year’s London Indian Film Festival.
The Bagri Foundation London Indian Film Festival and Birmingham Indian Film Festival have joined forces to offer a spectacular showcase of films and “In Conversation” interviews by leading South Asian talent from 25th June to the 5th July.
The programme will be updated regularly at www.loveliffathome.com
This includes the UK Premieres of much awaited films including Bollywood Director Prakash Jha’s upward mobility schooling drama Pareeksha, the searing gangster feature Moothon and the ‘American Pie’ style comedy The MisEducation of Bindu, among others.
After being challenged by the global pandemic, the festival has morphed into an online offering with www.LoveLIFFAtHome.com as the UK and Europe’s largest showcase of Indian Subcontinental cinema, showcasing the UK’s lockdown audiences a free programme, filled to the
brim with great movies including rarely seen classics such as Kerala stalwart, Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s BFI Sutherland Trophy winner Elippathayam (Rat-Trap), Bengali master, Buddhadeb Das Gupta’s epic award-winning tale Uttara (The Wrestlers) through to the visually ravishing widescreen vista of Sturla Gunnerson’s documentary Monsoon.
By complete contrast are new conversations with some of India’s hottest Bollywood talent including Ayushmann Khuranna who talks candidly about his rapid rise to fame from Vicky Donor to latest hits Article 15 which world premiered at the festival last year, through to the pan-Indian heroine of all seasons Vidya Balan, on June 28th, who discusses her new short film Natkhat and the importance of safeguarding women’s rights, while acclaimed character actor Adil Hussain gives rare insights into his craft.
The festival finishes with conversations by some of the world’s best loved Indian talent including Hollywood star Freida Pinto (Slumdog Millionaire, Love Sonia) and Canadian director Deepa Mehta (Fire, Earth, Water) talking about their careers.
Mixing it up further, the festival explores issues around Black Lives Matter and racism with a rare screening of the timeless, Mississippi Masala. Starring a young Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury, Mira Nair’s classic film explores issues of race, class and privilege as an Indian woman born in Africa and raised in America, falls in love with a black African American man in rural Mississippi.
On Saturday 27th June 8pm to midnight UK time, the festival will present an exclusive UK premiere of Prakash Jha’s family film Pareeksha. Inspired by real events, the film starring Adil Hussain explores one teenager’s passion to study, in spite of being poor and the lengths a father will go, to seeing his son’s aspirations come true. This inspiring film highlights some of the gaping social inequalities facing many low income families around the developing world.
The acclaimed film Moothon directed by Kerala child actress & film star turned director Geetu 
Mohandas, is produced by Cannes darling Anurag Kashyap; a gritty, fast paced, slum gangster story with a surprising LGBTQ+ romance seeded within, exploring conflicting emotions of love and loss.
The MisEducation of Bindu directed by Prarthana Mohan is a coming of age comedy, starring Hollywood rising star Megan Suri, indie actor David Arquette and Priyanka Bose who also stars in Pareeksha. Tackling issues such as bullying, fitting in and identity, the film focuses on the peculiar and chaotic world of teenage misfits as the naïve Bindu arrives in an American high school and disastrously gets a crush on the wrong boy.
Adoor’s Elippathayam (Rat-Trap) is available to watch now.
Moothon is available on 26th June and 3rd July 2020 from 8pm to 10 pm
Festival Schedule: https://www.loveliffathome.com/page/festival-schedule/
