F.i.g.h.t C.l.u.b

Time to say we told you so. Here – where we wrote that we are going to hear a lot about Kanu Behl’s Titli in the coming days. And much before anyone else, it was our Varun Grover who saw the film at Goa’s Film Bazaar, wrote about it’s brilliance and predicted that the film has all the potential to travel far. He got this one bang right.

So here’s the big news – Kanu Behl’s debut feature Titli has been selected for this year’s Cannes and will premiere in Un Certain Regard section.

Produced by Dibakar Banerjee Productions and Yash Raj Films, Titli features Ranvir Shorey, Amit Sial and newcomer Shashank Arora in lead roles. And here’s the official synopsis of the film –

In the badlands of Delhi’s dystopic underbelly, Titli, the youngest member of a violent car-jacking brotherhood plots a desperate bid to escape the ‘family’ business.
His struggle to do so is countered at each stage by his indignant brothers, who finally try marrying him off to ‘settle’ him.

Titli, finds an unlikely ally in his new wife, caught though she is in her own web of warped reality and dysfunctional dreams. They form a strange, beneficial partnership, only to confront their inability to escape the bindings of their family roots.  But is escape, the same as freedom?

Kanu is an almunus of SRFTI, worked with Dibakar Banerjee on Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, and co-wrote Love, Sex Aur Dhokha.

Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan and Ashim Ahluwalia’s Miss Lovely had premiered in the same section of Cannes.

And this is what Varun Grover wrote about the film in our year-end post –

The best Indian film I saw this year, and hopefully the whole of world will see soon, is Kanu Behl’s ‘Titli’. Seeing it on a desktop computer in IFFI, Goa’s ‘viewing room’ should be counted as an underwhelming, far from ideal setting, and still, this very dark very funny very depressing dastaavez on patriarchy BLEW ME AWAY like nothing this year. Stunning is the word. Breathless is another. Writing so sharp (Kanu Behl and Sharat Kataria co-wrote it) and performances so bang-on, not to mention excellent edgy-gritty cinematography (Siddharth Dewan), this is our best bet for world cinema honors next year.