These are ten short films you shouldn’t miss at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles which will take place from October 11 – 15, 2023 in Los Angeles, USA.

Anu by Pulkit Arora – New Zealand, India | 2023 – 14 minutes
A widow arrives in New Zealand to meet her son, but must be sequestered in dreaded hotel quarantine. With the grief of her husband’s passing still as fresh as the fragrance of his overcoat, she is eager to perform an auspicious Hindu ritual that will release his soul. When her priest in India is unable to perform the ceremony due to lockdown, she becomes determined to perform a DIY version of the demanding multi-step ritual within the confines of her sterile room. What could go wrong?

With every frame expertly detailing its own story while advancing the overall arc, Indian Kiwi filmmaker Pulkit Arora packs humor and gravitas into scenes as compact as the rice balls that a fine Prabha Ravi must cook up for her character. A wry and witty distillation of the bizarre loneliness of the covid-19 pandemic, Anu is as brief, fervent and light-winged as a prayer. (IFFLA 2023)

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Dear Me by Suchana Saha – India | 2022 – 4 minutes
A young woman composes a letter to herself. Laying bare her fear, loneliness and desire, she embraces her fragmented reality in a beautiful and audacious act of kindness.

Striking animation that transforms in bold and unexpected ways sweeps us into the mysterious labyrinths of memory, feeling and fantasy. Produced as part of her studies at the Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute (SRFTI), Suchana Saha’s gorgeous short premiered at the 2023 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). (IFFLA 2023)

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Fantasy in a concrete jungle by Mehedi Mostafa – USA | 2022 – 15 minutes
Bangladeshi filmmaker Mehedi Mostafa’s immersive essay on the sounds and sociality of Dhaka is a series of wonderments about place and home. Mostafa cuts between the city’s concrete chaos and the leisure of the faraway lush village with the curiosity of a poet-anthropologist. In capturing the labor and sweat of urban blue collar construction workers, he seems to also suggest their longings. In grounding his camera on the denizens of the streets, he tries to conjure in the viewer a sense of belonging.

Inspired by a talk by architect Keshef Mahboob Chowdhury, Mostafa never pretends he has answers. Instead his intuitive cinematography and imaginative sound design allow us to experience the paradoxes of the natural vs. the built, of utopia vs. the here-and-now. (IFFLA 2023)

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First Chair by Ethan Montgomery, Luke Montgomery – USA | 2022 – 13 minutes
Jin is the clarinet player in her college orchestra, where she’s proud to occupy the coveted first chair position. That is, until effortlessly confident Nathan enters the picture. A subtle but fierce competition brews between the two. Even the whiff of a friendship.

Tension steeped in much quietude and braided through a cascade of musicality is what makes Los Angeles based, half Indian, twin brother, director duo Ethan and Luke Montgomery’s fleet-footed drama about the SoCal college music scene so refreshing. Sensitively observing the conditional, fragmentary nature of Gen Z bonding, the brothers, one of whom portrays Nathan, play with movement and stillness in immersive and transportive ways. Come to watch youthful competition, stay to absorb the narrative’s melodies. (IFFLA 2023)

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Happy Rakhi by Ragini Bhasin – USA | 2022 – 10 minutes
During festive Rakhi—the day sisters tie their brothers a thread asking for their protection and wishing them a long and healthy life—a feisty young Indian American girl, playing rough with her male cousins, gets an unpleasant surprise, after which they don’t want to play with her anymore.

With a sharp yet delicate eye, alum Ragini Bhasin continues to explore the subject of female adolescence that she tackled in Ghazaal (IFFLA 2021). Showing remarkable facility in working with child actors, all of whom—but especially lead Ayanna Patel—are aptly cast here, Bhasin allows us to observe the alternating sweetness and cruelty of little kids, while suggesting that patriarchal gender binaries are coded early on in childhood. (IFFLA 2023)

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Men in Blue by Sachin Dheeraj Mudigonda – USA | 2022 – 35 minutes
Resistance brews among a group of Indian immigrants living in utter squalor, after having been lured as guest workers by a Texas shipyard to repair oil rigs and ships damaged by Hurricane Katrina. When one attempts the worst, the others are motivated to smuggle out camcorder testimonies of abuse of their human rights.

Expressionist, raw and intimate, this film’s exhuming of a hidden history of slave labor from the Global South burrows deep under your skin. Working masterfully with cinematographic suggestion, director Sachin Dheeraj Mudigonda chisels the layers of bitter irony extending through the sociopolitical context and inner lives of characters you come to deeply care for, including the laborer portrayed by veteran Antonythasan Jesuthasan (Dheepan). Hard to believe this bravura accomplishment of storytelling was Mudigonda’s MFA thesis film at UT-Austin, but then again, it won a student award from the Directors Guild of America. (IFFLA 2023)

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Mirage by Jhanvi Motla – USA | 2022 – 16 minutes
A young Indian widow moves to the California desert to help run her cousin’s crumbling motel. When she unwittingly gets caught up with the motel’s drifting drug user clientele, however, any hope she had for the American Dream devolves into nightmare.

With high stakes and impressive cinematography, writer-director Jhanvi Motla stealthily drains the optimism of her protagonist, played with a vulnerable righteousness by newcomer Shavya Samala. As streaks of surrealism only amplify the story’s queasy undertones and thriller underbelly, Motla unexpectedly flips the stereotype of the successful American motel run by Indian immigrants. (IFFLA 2023)

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Nocturnal Burger by Reema Maya – India, USA | 2023 – 28 minutes
The promise of a late-night bite at a local burger-joint lures a young girl into a rickshaw. When she ends up at a dysfunctional Mumbai police station a few hours later, a frustrated police woman must figure out what happened, amidst unreliable accounts from unlikely witnesses, as the event sparks a complex and emotional dialogue–that unfolds only partly in words–among various women from different walks of life.

Masterfully intertwining a multitude of perspectives that eloquently point to invisible bonds among women, IFFLA alum Reema Maya [Counterfeit Kunkoo, Grand Jury Honorable Mention for Short, IFFLA 2018] paints an intricate portrait of Indian urban society, in this astute and captivating film that dexterously uses the cinematic medium at its fullest power, with a haunting score punctuating a sophisticated soundscape to boot. The film world premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. (IFFLA 2023)

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Places I’ve Called My Own by Sushma Khadepaun – India, France | 2023 – 28 minutes
Yearning for motherhood and at a critical point in her IVF fertility treatment, Tara, a young queer woman, returns from her life in the US to India to attend her father’s funeral. As the shadow of the paterfamilias still looms large, she must navigate fragile remnants of daughterhood and shades of unrequited love within spaces she once called home.

Multi-time IFFLA alum Aditi Vasudev (Anita, Tara Versus, Sulemani Keeda) delivers a mesmerizing lived-in performance, embodying the full breadth of Tara’s power and vulnerability, while arresting cinematography within a covid-infested world eerily amplifies the precarity of her interior landscape. Sushma Khadepaun’s (Anita, IFFLA 2021) humanist lens and superb storytelling masterfully capture the taut liminal space within which a self-assured and memorable heroine must reconcile the place she carries as the daughter of others, while upholding her own version of adulthood. This is what visionary and utterly compelling cinema looks like. (IFFLA 2023)

Running by Arpita Mukherjee – USA | 2022 – 40 minutes
In this ambitious yet moving hybrid documentary, celebrated actor Danny Pudi (Community, DuckTales) goes on a mission to learn about his estranged Telugu father shortly after his death. Collaborating with New York based director Arpita Mukherjee, Pudi devises a script detailing a playful, throwback video game concept that literally takes him down portals towards his father’s past. Switching to a more traditional documentary mode, Pudi interviews his dad’s inner circle, learning about his youthful brush with Rishi Kapoor, his love of American sports, and the painful day he abandoned his Polish wife, when Pudi was just two.

As we run alongside Pudi through the maze of mystery, an homage really to the modalities of the theater, a marvelous realization dawns: all the world can in fact be a stage for our intimacies, and with the help of “super memory” and old acquaintance, the long departed can become more known and closer to us. (IFFLA 2023)

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More information: https://indianfilmfestival.org/