From small-town dreams and spiritual journeys to lost friendships, old rituals, and a classic by Satyajit Ray — the five Indian films at Cannes this year show how varied our cinema can be
The five films that are being screened at the ongoing Cannes film festival reflect vastly different worlds of Indian cinema. They include the story of two small-town friends chasing police jobs (Homebound), a spiritual reckoning through injury (A Doll Made Up of Clay), or Satyajit Ray’s 1970 meditation on masculinity and class (Aranyer Din Ratri).
This year also sees actor Anupam Kher stepping behind the camera with a musical set in contemporary India (Tanvi the Great), and Sheiladitya Moulik exploring religious extremism in Bengal (Charak). Together, they offer a panoramic view of where Indian cinema is and what stories it continues to unearth. Here’s looking at the five Indian films at Cannes:
1. Homebound, directed by: Neeraj Ghaywan: Homebound, Neeraj Ghaywan’s first feature since Masaan (2015), follows two young men from a North Indian village who see careers in the police force as a way to reclaim agency and social standing. Ishaan Khatter and Vishal Jethwa play childhood friends who prepare for the same exam, sharing dreams, resources, and a growing fear that the future may not arrive in time. When a moment of betrayal alters the course of their friendship, the film shifts from being about aspiration to something more intimate: how dignity survives disappointment.
Ghaywan has often worked within a sharply observed realism — whether on Masaan, or in his segment of Ajeeb Daastaans, or on Made in Heaven Season 2. But Homebound is more expansive in scope. Janhvi Kapoor plays a medical student who becomes an emotional anchor for the two friends while navigating her own family’s class anxieties. The film resists the urge to moralize, instead observing how state jobs become a lifeline in places where the state often fails its citizens.
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The creative team behind Homebound is unusually global. Martin Scorsese comes on board as executive producer, a rare international endorsement for a grounded Indian narrative. The film is backed by Dharma Productions (Karan Johar), along with billionaire Adar Poonawalla’s Poonawalla Foundation, and features a European co-production partner in Melita Toscan du Plantier.
2. A Doll Made Up of Clay, written and directed by: Kokob Gebrehaweria Tesfay: Kokob Gebrehaweria Tesfay’s short film A Doll Made Up of Clay, produced by Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI), is the only Indian selection in the La Cinef category this year — a section dedicated to film students from around the world. Tesfay, an Ethiopian student at SRFTI in Kolkata, draws from both African diasporic realities and South Asian locations to tell the story of a young Nigerian footballer in India whose dreams collapse after a serious injury.
The 23-minute film opens in the aftermath. A torn ligament ends the protagonist’s chances of making it professionally. With his father’s land already sold to fund the move to India, the character finds himself unmoored — economically, emotionally, and spiritually. His journey toward healing, or at least self-repair, takes him into unfamiliar territory: religious rites, ancestral practices, and the memory of a mother who once warned him about forgetting his roots. Shot around Kolkata and using non-professional actors, A Doll Made Up of Clay is not a typical student film. Its ambitions are neither experimental nor didactic — it simply wants to look at what happens when the promise of movement leads to emotional paralysis.
3. Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest), directed by Satyajit Ray: One of the classics of Indian cinema returns to Cannes in a newly restored 4K version. Aranyer Din Ratri, made by auteur Satyajit Ray in 1970, was his first exploration of contemporary urban men away from their environment. The film centres on four friends from Calcutta (now Kolkata) who head to the forests of Palamau for a short holiday. What begins as a casual escape becomes, over a few days, a subtle but unsettling examination of class, desire, and how men behave when social norms are left behind. The film will be screened on May 19 (Monday), 07:45 pm, at the Salle Buñuel, Palais des Festivals.
The characters are not adventurers — they are middle-class men looking for a break. Yet their interaction with two women they meet in the forest, played by Sharmila Tagore and Kaberi Bose, brings buried tensions to the surface. One of Ray’s sharpest works, Aranyer Din Ratri is less interested in plot than in observation. He watches how language shifts around class; how the men’s camaraderie is complicated by hierarchy, memory, and casual cruelty.
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The restoration was led by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project (founded by Martin Scorsese), the Film Heritage Foundation in India, and Janus Films. The original camera and sound negatives were preserved by the late producer Purnima Dutta and restored under the supervision of Ray’s son, filmmaker Sandip Ray. At Cannes, the film will be introduced by filmmaker and Board Member of The Film Foundation Wes Anderson and its lead actress Sharmila Tagore and actress Simi Garewal.
4. Tanvi the Great, directed by Anupam Kher: Anupam Kher steps into the director’s chair for the first time in over two decades with Tanvi the Great, a Hindi-English musical, which will premiere in the Cannes film market, Marché du Film. The film introduces Shubhangi Dutt in the title role of Tanvi, a gifted teenager who uses music as a way to navigate grief, social pressures, and the widening distance between generations. The story takes place in modern-day India but avoids obvious urban backdrops. Instead, it locates Tanvi’s voice through school choirs and the encouragement of her teacher (played by Iain Glen, best known as Ser Jorah in Game of Thrones). M.M. Keeravani, fresh off his Oscar win for Naatu Naatu, composes the score. Keiko Nakahara (known for Tanhaji) is the cinematographer while choreography is by Kruti Mahesh.
5. Charak, directed by Sheiladitya Moulik: Based on the centuries-old Charak Puja in Bengal — a ritual that involves physical endurance and spiritual trial — Charak is less a period piece than a psychological thriller. When two children go missing during the festival, the film’s village setting becomes a pressure cooker. Old beliefs resurface, blame circulates, and fear begins to resemble faith. The local priest, believed to be in touch with divine forces, becomes a figure of both hope and menace. What the film captures effectively is the logic of rumour —how people under duress search for patterns, often creating scapegoats in the process. Charak was first screened at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year and received good responses for its screenplay and sound design. Its showing at the Cannes Market is part of a push to find international distribution.