As Agra is set to premiere at Cannes, director Behl says festival support is important for offbeat films to reach the audience
Agra
Having one’s feature screen in the prestigious section of Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival is a matter of pride. But to director Kanu Behl, the upcoming première of Agra at the French Riviera is the means to an end. “The biggest reason for feeling good is because I know that the film is one step closer to reaching the audiences in India,” beams Behl, whose last feature film, Titli (2015), premièred at the Un Certain Regard section of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.
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Behl’s films are divorced from the mainstream, frothy offerings of Bollywood. This knowledge has come to him with the realisation that his movies will need a festival endorsement to see the light of day in India. “I am clearly not Bollywood. There is a certain kind of film that gets financed here through a certain structure. Unfortunately, there is no commercial structure for the cinema I subscribe to, and hope a certain audience would want to engage with. So, a film festival debut becomes a necessary component in the journey of such a movie,” he explains.
Starring Rahul Roy and Priyanka Bose, Agra is described as an exploration of sexual dynamics within a family. The director believes that the movie tackles an urgent subject. “After Titli released, I asked myself, ‘What do I want to talk about?’ That’s when I realised there was a part of me, which I had felt over the years, but not expressed. Like me, I had seen a lot of young men who had felt this repression. It made me question the presence of sexuality and desire within our lives in the specific cultural context of our country.”
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