CONTEMPORARY ALTERNATIVE INDIAN CINEMA: TOWARDS A NEW FILM LANGUAGE

Contemporary cinema in India since the late 2000s spanning across several languages has found to occupy a new space of ‘indie' or ‘independent' in international film festival parlance and domestic circles of festivals, journalists and filmmakers themselves. Moving away from fixed genres and conventions of big-budget commercial cinema in the country, several filmmakers and production houses are either self-funding or producing films through collaboration with Indian or international funding. This paper looks at this trajectory in Indian cinema through the narratives and filming choices of the filmmakers through two case studies – the Punjabi language film called Alms for the Blind Horse (2011) and the Hindi language film Autumn (2010). Through these case studies, I employ textual analysis and interviews to argue that a certain legacy of the New Wave period of cinema in India during the late 60s to80s is visible in the contemporary moment and filmmakers are exploring new ways to communicate local stories to the audiences nationally and internationally.