Past screening

Bagri Foundation LIFF: Reason

Directed by: Anand Patwardhan
Runtime: 4hr 0min Year: 2018

Details

Directed by: Anand Patwardhan
Runtime: 4hr 0min Year: 2018
Country: India

Reason is a hard-hitting political documentary by India’s greatest documentarian that reveals shockingly deep fissures in rapidly changing Indian society.

The Bagri Foundation London Indian Film Festival brings you India’s greatest documentarian Anand Patwardhan (Jai Bhim Comrade, War And Peace) after world premiered Reason at the Toronto International Film Festival.

This powerful chronicle of contemporary India depicts how, after decades of relatively peaceful secular democracy, the country is now increasingly divided by religion, caste and power, and the inevitable violence that ensues.

Patwardhan initially follows activists, rationalists and dissenters Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare and then broadens his gaze to look at questions of communism and caste.

What Patwardhan depicts is not pretty, portraying as it does India’s rapid march towards being a more right wing nation where free speech is increasingly being controlled by any means necessary. A riveting and sobering film that will inform and frustrate in equal measure, Reason is a must watch, and is perhaps the most important documentary to emerge from India in recent Years.

Screening as part of Bagri Foundation London Indian Film Festival at DocHouse. LIFF is the UK and Europe’s largest South Asian film festival. The festival aims to show an entertaining, thought provoking line-up of independent films that offer a rare window into a billion South Asian lives in the sub-continent right now.