Deep6 and The Road To Kuthriyar to be premiered at Busan International Film Festival

The Bengali film Deep6, directed by Madhuja Mukherjee, and the Tamil-English film The Road To Kuthriyar, directed by Bharat Mirle, will have their world premieres at the 26th Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) in South Korea. The festival is being held from 6–15 October this year.

Along with Irfana Majumdar’s Shankar’s Fairies, which was premiered at Locarno in August, the Indian films will be screened in the A Window on Asian Cinema section. Aparna Sen's The Rapist is also being screened in the same section and will compete for the Kim Jiseok award.

Deep6, produced by Shoojit Sircar and Ronnie Lahiri, is set in 2011 Kolkata. The Bengali film features Tillotama Shome, Chandan Roy Sanyal, Sumeet Thakur, Maya Ghosh, Sumanta Mukherjee and the late cine icon Soumitra Chatterjee.

Sircar, who has produced Deep6 under his banner Rising Sun Pvt Ltd, said he was elated and honoured by the film’s global premiere. “I have known Madhuja for many years and it has been a privilege to work with her and my close personal friend [cinematographer] Avik Mukhopadhyay on this unique film. Ronnie and I are always looking to present evolved and out-of-the-box content, and it was a great experience teaming up with people who share the same vision for Deep6.”

Writer-director Mukherjee calls her film a “battleground of love, death, despair and desire”. Shome plays an ordinary woman named Mitul who aims to change things which have stagnated. Deep6 has been shot in Kolkata by Mukhopadhayay.

“Amongst the many Kolkata chronicles, this is my story — told from a woman’s point of view,” the filmmaker said. “At one level, it is a straightforward narrative about us — women — who shared a political dream and endured the intellectual big brothers; at another level, it progressively became an account about collective wants, dilemmas, oversights, vulnerabilities and the city neighbourhoods.”

The Road To Kuthriyar, written and directed by Mirle, was part of the Film Bazaar Recommends programme last year and revolves around a wildlife researcher, Dhruv (Dhruv Athreye), who has to conduct a ‘mammal survey’ of the 600 sq km Kodaikanal Wildlife Sanctuary in Tamil Nadu. He gets assistance from a local tribesman, Dorai (Chinna Dorai), who becomes his guide and forms an unlikely connection.

In the course of the survey, city boy Dhruv learns more about Dorai and his village life, and his attitude towards those less fortunate than him begins to change.

Mirle’s previous film, the short documentary 175 Grams (2015), won the Sundance Short Film award and was screened at the 2015 edition of the festival.