Vishal Bhardwaj and Shaunak Sen join new film fund initiative supporting independent cinema

What are the vital ingredients an aspiring filmmaker needs when they have a story to tell but no outlet? Beyond a script, they need financial stability, production expertise, and industry access. Addressing this gap, Humans of Cinema and Safarnaama Pictures have launched a landmark feature film co-production fund of Rs 40,00,000 designed to back an emerging filmmaker with a distinct voice and a clear vision. In a significant boost to the independent ecosystem, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Shaunak Sen (All That Breathes) and globally acclaimed auteur Vishal Bhardwaj have joined the initiative as mentors. Sen is also attached to the selected project as an Executive Producer. The high-profile jury for the fund includes actor Imran Khan, filmmaker Arati Kadav (Cargo, Mrs), producer Aman Mann (All That Breathes), and renowned author and festival director Aseem Chhabra. Harshit Bansal, Founder of Humans of Cinema, shared that the idea took shape when Nazim Momin of Safarnaama Pictures—...

The Narrow Road review – tough times for the downtrodden in pandemic Hong Kong

After deciding it’s time to seek help with his cleaning business, despairing Chak meets the zanily upbeat Candy

Set in Hong Kong during the early days of the pandemic, Lam Sum’s tender drama pictures a city haunted by economic and political uncertainty. Storefronts are plastered with foreclosure and bankruptcy notices, while talk of moving abroad hovers amid everyday conversations. Plagued by faulty equipment, the one-man sanitary service operated by world-weary Chak (played by Cantopop star Louis Cheung) is on the verge of breaking down. When asked by his ailing mother if God is telling him to give up the business, Chak self-deprecatingly describes himself as a speck of dust, so tiny that even the deities would not take notice.

Reluctantly hired as an extra pair of helping hands on his cleaning rounds, single-mom Candy (Angela Yuen) enters Chak’s life like a whirlwind of chaos. With her impossibly sunny attitude and colourful fashion sense, Candy could have come off as a manic pixie archetype; Yuen instead manages to lend an emotional weight to the character’s capricious quirkiness. A particularly devastating sequence finds the pair scrubbing the human-shaped stain left by a nameless soul who has died alone in squalor, another speck of dust forgotten by the outside world.

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