TITLI: India's Promising Gem at Cannes Film Festival

As the Cannes Film Festival (67th edition) has started this week, we at the Hindi Cinema Blog are bringing you the latest on Titli, directed by Kanu Behl, and featured in the festival's Un Certain Regard category.  

The film will be screening on the 20th and 21st of May in two different Cannes theatres. It benefits from the joint support of renowned independent cinema producer Dibakar Banerjee and YRF, who have accessorily roped in The Lunchbox producer, Guneet Monga, to handle international sales.

The film's story unfolds in the badlands of Delhi's underbelly, where 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. 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 Behl worked closely with Dibakar Banerjee during the filming of Oye Lucky ! Lucky Oye ! as well as Love Sex Aur Dhokha. Producer Dibakar Banerjee has gone on record for saying that their close collaboration had resulted in the unspoken evidence that he would undoubtedly produce Behl's first film. Once the director came up with Titli's script, Banerjee was extremely inspired by it. He has expressed "As a producer I’m interested in giving birth to a film that is difficult to give birth to, because it’s the difficult child that does something which history remembers (...) Kanu decided that he’d rather have this obscure film seen by 3 people, rather than try and be many things to many people. That militancy of sticking to his demons is what has made this (Titli) one of the most fascinating debut films of Indian cinema in a long-long time".

On the subject of choosing to make a non-commercial film, Kanu Behl says, "I think the big decision to shoot it as realistic as possible and have as many non-actors was because I really wanted to break away from this tradition of falsification. Bollywood is not the kind of cinema that I believe in".

We wish India's only participating film in this years festival the best. Meanwhile, enjoy Titli's impressive and highly promising international trailer below:

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TITLI

- Director: Kanu BEHL

- Script / Dialogue: Sharat KATARIYA, Kanu BEHL
- Director of Photography: Siddharth DIWAN

- Producer: Dibakar BANERJEE

- Music: Sneha Khanwalkar

- Cast: Ranvir SHOREY, Amit SIAL, Lalit BEHL, Shivani RAGHUVANSH, Shashank ARORA