A line from it goes, “ Umra main saariyan ji laiyan, roshni me saariyan pi laiyan” (I’ve lived all of the lifetimes/I’ve drunk up all of the light).
BEST HINDI MOVIES 2019 MOVIE
As The Sky is Pink gets over, its end credits tells us about Aisha Chaudhary - the young girl who inspired the movie - and a song starts playing, written and composed by her elder brother. But the movie is fundamentally an affecting ode to remembrance. This drama is several things at once: a cruel reminder that how life is - and has always been - unfair, a snapshot of a crumbling marriage, a small love story. Narrated by a girl (Zaira Wasim) about to die a tragic young death, The Sky is Pink, despite its inherent bleakness, is filled with… joy. It’s perhaps one of the reasons her last two dramas - Margarita With a Straw (2015) and The Sky is Pink, inspired by grim real-life stories - felt like quasi-comedies. The Sky is Pink : Director Shonali Bose understands a vital fact about grief: that like nearly everything in this world, grief, too, has an expiry date - that it, too, passes. Initially unfolding like a crime thriller, Article 15 is a deep examination of the disturbing biases in individuals, comprising the ‘system’ - the police, the media - and how they have, over the years, failed the founding literature of the Indian republic.Ĥ. But Article 15 - centred on a cop (Ayushmann Khurrana) investigating the rape and murders of two Dalit girls - is a rare Bollywood movie that confronts the issue of caste discrimination head-on. Caste, in particular, is seldom discussed in our films - a ubiquitous reality that continues to shape the lives of a vast majority of Indians, if not everyone, in subtle and overt ways. Article 15 : Bollywood filmmakers have had a long tradition of upholding the status quo, depicting a small slice of Indian life. My list of the top five Hindi films of 2019 runs below:ĥ.
BEST HINDI MOVIES 2019 SERIES
( Gully Boy’s director, Zoya Akhtar, redeemed herself with Made in Heaven - an Amazon Prime series that she co-conceptualised and -directed - which was poignant and layered.) And then there was a small bunch that got it right: in a largely bleak movie year, in all respects, they provided some much-needed light. Good art is a messy, exacting affair: it doesn’t care for intentions.Īlso Read: ‘No Fathers in Kashmir’ Shows Conflict and Violence in a New LightĮven beyond the overtly political (if at all you can compartmentalise the personal and political - in 2019, of all the years), there were movies that shimmered with promise but materialised with fading glow: Gully Boy, Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga, Photograph, Mard Ko Dard Nahin Hota. On the big screen, there were No Fathers for Kashmir (eerily chilling in the aftermath of the Kashmir lockdown), Bharat (a predictable Salman Khan fare that cherished the bond between Indians and Pakistanis), The Least of These (a long-due drama on the Graham Staines murder) - too unfortunate, then, that these movies failed to hold up as a whole.
Manoj Bajpai in a still from The Family Man. They mainly came in the form of web series, in Netflix’s Leila and Sacred Games 2 (a pity, however, that they largely lacked artistic merits) and Amazon Prime’s The Family Man - my unambiguous favourite of the year across formats.
Which doesn’t mean, though, that there were no pieces of resistance.
We had such films (and even web series) as Kesari, Tashkent Files, PM Narendra Modi, Modi - A Journey of a Common Man, Mission Mangal, Batla House: none of these were made with any nuance or finesse not too surprising, for such are the demands of deference. Nationalism, Narendra Modi - and an exaggerated fear of “anti-nationals” - dominated Indian screens throughout the year. Besides the Manmohan Singh biopic, that month gave us Uri (a slick propaganda extolling Modi and national security advisor Ajit Doval), Manikarnika (Kangana Ranaut’s induction into saffron nationalism) and Thackeray (a 139-minute hate speech). (It is also not every Friday that the BJP’s Twitter account shares the trailer of a movie.) January 2019 was, in fact, a good indication of the rest of the year.
2019, after all, began with a political drama – The Accidental Prime Minister – that took potshots at the Congress party, a film that Narendra Modi would have enjoyed. There’s been an undeniable circularity in the relationship between Indian politics and Hindi cinema this year. In a year ending with anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act protests rippling across the country, India’s prime minister in a recent speech, to no one’s surprise, blamed “urban Naxals and Congress” for spreading rumours about an Act that openly discriminates against Muslims.