Toronto Film Festival: Food-delivery app drivers and Mumbai's courtyard cricketers race to tell their stories on the international festival circuit

'What’s Love Got To Do With It?' by Shekhar Kapur, the director's first feature film in 15 years, is a romantic comedy set in London and Lahore.

A brother and sister find themselves on opposing cricket teams in Mumbai. A food-delivery app driver struggles to negotiate a life steered by a technology-driven society. A father fights an entire system and his village to get justice for his young daughter gangraped in Jharkhand.

The journey of a new India teeming with possibilities while struggling to shake off the shackles of inequality and injustice is reflected in the selection of Indian movies at the 47th Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) beginning on September 8. The festival has seven films in feature, documentary and short format categories from Indian and Indian-origin filmmakers this year, each telling a distinct story of a nation and its people.

Among the feature films are Zwigato by Nandita Das, Kacchey Limbu by first-time director Shubham Yogi, Tora's Husband by Rima Das and What’s Love Got To Do With It? by Shekhar Kapur. Films by three Indian-Canadians - This Place by V.T. Nayani, To Kill a Tiger by Nisha Pahuja, and The Chase by Gurjeet Kaur Bassi - complete the India-linked selection this year.

'To Kill a Tiger' is a documentary.

Baahubali and RRR director S.S. Rajamouli is scheduled to deliver a keynote address on Telugu cinema and the notion of art versus commerce at the Visionaries programme of TIFF Industry Conference, a meeting point of global entertainment industry leaders. Among other guest speakers at the Visionaries programme are former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and daughter Chelsea Clinton, who will present a new Apple documentary series, Gutsy, based on the bestselling book, The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience, jointly authored by them.

Life and Algorithm

Nandita Das, whose first appearance at the Toronto festival was as an actor in Fire, is ready with her third directorial venture after the critically-acclaimed Firaaq (2008) and Manto (2018). Teasingly titled Zwigato, the new feature film by the Mumbai-born actor-director traverses a world of app and algorithms in the story of a food-delivery app driver.

Comedian Kapil Sharma plays the role of Manas, who becomes a driver for a food-delivery app Zwigato after losing his factory-floor manager job during the pandemic. Set in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, Zwigato focuses on the lives of Manas and his wife Pratima (Shahana Goswami), who is looking for a cleaning job at a mall. The director, whose previous film was a Partition drama centred on the life of Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto, says: "Zwigato is a story of new urban India and the relentlessness of life, but not without its silver linings."

Nandita Das' 'Zwigato' will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Cricket and Gender

Shot entirely on location in Mumbai, Kacchey Limbu - produced by Jio Studios and Mango People Media - is a Hindi language feature by debutant director Shubham Yogi that explores the story of a young girl leaving behind academic ambitions to embrace cricket.

Actor Radhika Madan, who debuted as a karate kid in TIFF Midnight Madness category winner Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota by Vasan Bala in 2018, plays the lead role of a young woman who deviates from her dream job of a fashion designer to end up shaping a cricket team. She will go on to face her brother, who meanwhile swaps his corporate job ambitions for league cricket, on the pitch.

"Kacchey Limbu is far more than a cricket story," says Yogi, who was born and raised in Delhi. "I never thought of a female protagonist as a gendered choice. The film is primarily a coming-of-age story of a young, middle-class person who has to navigate her conditioning and find her own unique voice. Our protagonist happens to be a young girl. But that is not her only identity," adds the director, an avid practitioner of gully cricket.

From Hindi film 'Kacchey Limbu' by first-time director Shubham Yogi.

Film and Family

Set in a village in Jharkhand, Indian-Canadian film-maker Nisha Pahuja's new documentary, To Kill a Tiger, is about the gangrape of a 13-year-old girl returning from a wedding. Ranjit, the girl's father and a marginal farmer, seeks justice after he is told that his daughter may wed one of the rapists to salvage the family's dignity and uphold peace in the village.

The film follows Delhi-born Pahuja's 2012 documentary The World Before Her, about two young Indian women, one training for a beauty pageant and the other in a training camp to become a member of a right-wing militant organisation.

To Kill a Tiger, which took eight years to make, shows the family's fight for justice while it faces threats of violence during a 14-month trial. "Although she’s undoubtedly the victim of a brutal crime, 'J' (the survivor) is so much more. Her 13-year-old body is the battleground upon which an epic and age-old battle is being fought, one that has to do with power, honour, community and justice," says Pahuja in her director's statement. "In demanding her legal rights from her country, in effect she demands change, and she asks for the restoration of a much deeper moral order rooted in the precept of do 'no harm', " adds the director who is known for non-fiction works in India.

Fifteen years after he made his last feature film, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Shekhar Kapur is back with his new work, a romantic comedy What’s Love Got To Do With It? written by Jemima Khan.

Set in London and Lahore, the film in English and Urdu brings together actors Emma Thompson, Lily James and Shabana Azmi. James plays the role of a London-based filmmaker making a movie on her Pakistani-origin neighbour embarking on an arranged marriage in Lahore.

Assamese filmmaker Rima Das, whose sophomore feature Village Rockstars was a world premiere at TIFF in 2017, becomes the first Indian director to compete for the festival's Platform Prize with her new film, Tora's Husband. With a more urban setting than her previous films, Tora's Husband is about a couple wrestling with tensions as their world crumbles under the disastrous effects of the pandemic.

Feature film This Place by Indian-Canadian director V.T. Nayani explores same-sex love between two refugees - a young Tamil woman and an Iranian - in Toronto.

Toronto-based Gurjeet Kaur Bassi, another Indian-origin director, tells the story of a working-class Punjabi immigrant couple in Canada in her 11-minute short film, The Chase, in English and Punjabi.

Among the festival highlights are Ben Kingsley as Spanish artist Salvador Dalí in Dalíland by American Psycho director Mary Harron, Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues by American director Sacha Jenkins on the life and works of the legendary jazz musician, The King's Horseman, an adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s acclaimed anti-colonial play, Death and the King’s Horseman, by Nigerian filmmaker and novelist Biyi Bandele, who died last month, the world premiere of Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans, a personal work showing the origins of the director's love for cinema, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery by Rian Johnson, the sequel to Knives Out about detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) travelling to Greece for his latest case, and the world premiere of Season 5 of The Handmaid’s Tale directed by American filmmakers Bruce Miller and Elisabeth Moss.