Film Reviews
Reason/Vivek
Reason Review: Detective Patwardhan
Marc Glassman | POV Magazine
Finding Reason at True/False Film Fest
Daniel Kasman | MUBI
The Cinema of a Violent Interval
Jyotsna Kapur | THE BEACON
Toronto international film festival review
J. Barton Scott | Journal of Religion & Film
Pricking The Conscience Of All Indians
Saibal Chatterjee | NDTV
“Why did the police not break Anand Patwardhan’s bones?”
Akash Bhattacharya | People's Film Collective
Anand Patwardhan: Dissent in the time of intolerance
ANUPAMA KATAKAM | FRONTLINE
Patwardhan’s Vivek: A courageous expose of extremism
S.R. Praveen | The Hindu
Reason Highlights The Brilliant Minds Lost To Reckless Divisive Violence
Biaas Sanyal | Film Companion
Shubhra Gupta | The Indian Express
Anand Patwardhan’s Vivek is an exhaustive commentary on a diminishing democracy
Bedatri D Choudhury | Firstpost
India, today: Anand Patwardhan’s documentary ‘Reason’ holds a troubling mirror to the headlines
Nandini Ramnath | Scroll
Anand Patwardhan’s Vivek is on the increasing radicalisation of contemporary India
Namrata Joshi | The Hindu
Jai Bhim Comrade
SALIL TRIPATHI | The Caravan
लाल झेंडे और नीले रिबन के बीच
(Between red flag and blue ribbon)
Uday Shankar | Hans Magazine
Mark Cousins | Sight & Sound
A Soulful Song Of The Nowhere People
Dr Anand Teltumbde | Countercurrents
Where The Republic Still Lives
Javed Iqbal, DNA
Tales of oppression and songs of resistance
Catherine Bernier | Jump Cut
India’s uncomfortable truths on film
Sukhdev Sandhu | The Guardian
Kavita Krishnan | The Armchair Philosopher
Saroj Giri | Tehelka
Sunalini Kumar | Kafila
Jai Bhim Comrade: Songs of justice that threaten the State
Satyen Bordolai | SIFY
“It is an epic subject, and in Patwardhan’s hands, it receives epic form.”
Trisha Gupta | The Sunday Guardian
Manjiri Indukar | Reel Life
Jai Bhim Comrade-Anand Patwardhan
Mumbai Paused
Stigma and labour: remembering Dalit Marxism
Anupama Rao | Seminar
Priyanka Borupujari | The Hindu
Caste and Credit: The Jai Bhim Saga
Jyoti Punwani, Times of India
War and Peace
"War and Peace has a riveting intelligence all its own and earns its epic title."
Elvis Mitchell – The New York Times
"Perhaps the most important film in this year’s Berlin Film Festival."
Reuters
"A must-see for those who care about peace, not war."
Rashid Irani | Times of India
"Did somebody say documentaries were boring?"
Nandini Ramnath | Time Out
War and Peace monumental War Documentary more committed to peace than bloodshed
Graham Williamson - CINEMA ECLECTICA
Sunanda Mehta – The Indian Express
“We should listen to our voices of dissent for our own sake and for the sake of our children and their children. War and Peace is that voice’s most eloquent expression. Which is why it should be seen by everyone, everywhere. In schools, in colleges, in factories, on television.”
Anil Dharker - The Times of India
“The explosions and the resultant jingoistic euphoria are a function of the frustration and fevered anger of a failed elite, the film argues, backing its argument with vivid images of nationalistic and religious fervor that verge on the surreal.”
Ashfaque Swapan - India-West
“This film by India’s leading documentary filmmaker is so important that one could justify its requirement as part of the education of all high school students and undergraduates in America…
Blair B. Kling – University of Illinois
Censoring peace amid nuclear “deterrence”
By Ammu Joseph
Atomic India - How Hindu Nationalists learned to love the bomb
A.S. Hamrah | The Boston Globe
“Patwardhan is as unsparing in his criticism of the aggressiveness of the American military and nuclear machine as he is of the nuclear pretensions of India and Pakistan…
Vinay Lal – Manas
Father, Son and Holy War
"Rampant machismo is never a pretty sight"
Gail Minault - Journal of Asian Studies
Dismantling Men - Crisis of Male Identity in Father, Son and Holy War
Rustom Barucha | Economic and Political Weekly
"Father, Son and Holy War, through a careful layering of images, views and counter-views takes you far beyond the generally superficial vision of Indian politics that the standard television documentary delivers."
Pervaiz Khan, London Film Festival
"A documentary about the link between men with ants in their pants and fire in their bellies."
Nandini Ramnath | Time Out Mumbai
“Father, Son and Holy War” amongst 50 all-time favourites in world cinema.
DOX MAGAZINE, EUROPE
Fishing: In the Sea of Greed
“With Fishing in the Sea of Greed, Anand has been able to mesh together events that concern a community with a proximity & transparence that touches an immediate inner chord.”
Signe Byrge Sorensen, Zebra News, Media Mail
A Narmada Diary
A letter from Achyut Patwardhan
February 1988
In the name of God
"The screen is electric with religious fervor, masses of people swarming through the streets, gathering in rallies, or violently rioting… This is investigative cinema verité documentary at its dynamic best."
Kay Armatage, Toronto Film Festival
"Hard-hitting, provocative, revealing look at secularism in India under siege from militants on both sides. Patwardhan explores this tragedy in this lucid, courageous film that allows supporters of both sides to have their say… A documentary well worth seeking out."
Variety
"A deceptively informal look at one lethal instance of India’s move towards fundamentalist politics. For those who need to translate westward, it provides a possible clairvoyant example of the force of religious-political belief."
Cameron Bailey
"An acutely informative, restrainedly courageous, and grimly prophetic film."
Hank Heifetz, author | ORIGIN OF THE YOUNG GOD
"A must-see film… RAM KE NAAM"
by P.Sainath | Blitz
In Memory of Friends
"That this was present in a man of just 23 (Bhagat Singh) was all so impressive that Patwardhan could not but see him as a great intellectual apart from being an inexorable revolutionary."
Adrian Khare | Blitz
"With growing Muslim fundamentalism in Kashmir, Sikh fundamentalism in Punjab and Hindu fundamentalism in not just the Hindi speaking heartland but even in Kerala, and West Bengal, the importance of such a political, ideological, intellectual and human document as that produced by Anand Patwardhan cannot be over emphasised."
Vidyarthi Chatterjee | Economic Times
Bombay: Our City
"This writer considers it perhaps Patwardhan’s most mature and hard hitting film which exposes not only the ugly face of Bombay but the hypocrisy of some of its top authorities as well as the unbroken spirit of its slumdwellers.”
Amita Malik | Statesman
"Simply one of the best documentaries I have ever seen.”
Sean Cubitt | City Limits, London, UK
"Patwardhan gives us this story simply and clearly, with restrained passion, and it becomes, finally, appalling and moving.”
Michael Wilmington – The Los Angeles Times
"Quite clearly, BOMBAY: OUR CITY is the best documentary ever made in India."
Khalid Mohamed | The Times of India
"A member of the U.P.M.C. (Upper Middle Class) with guilt becomes a sentimental socialist. A sentimental socialist with an excess of guilt, becomes a proto-Marxist and is dangerous. A sentimental socialist with talent becomes excessively dangerous. Anand Patwardhan’s film on demolition of slums in Bombay ‘Hamara Shaher’ showed and discussed at the British Council on 3rd July ’85 can perhaps best be understood against this background."
Shankar Menon – Financial Express
"Does Patwardhan honestly feel that he is giving the “privileged” class a fair hearing, or is fairness not the purpose of the film? Whereas I had gone to see the film with an open mind ready to sympathize with the problems and tragedy of hutment dwellers, I suddenly found myself on the defensive — or perhaps that was the intention of the director."
Meenakshi Raja – The Afternoon
A Time to Rise
"A stirring documentary that left me fascinated by the dignity and passion with which farm labourers are facing down fear and violence to form a union…"
Michelle Landsberg | Toronto Star
"The film makes the farmworker’s union fight for recognition into a tough but exhilarating drama… the film never lapses into rhetoric but is carried along by well paced action."
Doug Ward | The Vancouver Sun
"This forty minute documentary is among the rare militant Canadian made films in which the relationships between the struggles of the farmworkers throughout North America are made explicit."
Luc Perreault | La Presse, Montreal
Prisoners of Conscience
"The result of a few years of painstaking work Prisoners of Conscience is a bold attempt to fight against the lies the system in India wishes to propagate on the issue of political prisoners. It is real, authentic, and part of the movement. …needs to be shown widely."
Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars
"PRISONERS OF CONSCIENCE, made under appalling conditions, displayed a courage never shown before in the documentary movement in India."
Business Weekly Standard
"The power of the film derives from its restraint. Restraint does not imply a reluctance to state facts. The film does that only too clearly."
Ayesha Kagal | The Times of India
"A paean to those in the past and those in the present who have not hesitated to struggle for a just society and who, in the process, may have been imprisoned or even lost their lives."
Critical Asian Studies
Waves of Revolution
"In India, we have no Joris Evens who had a film making career that took him around the globe where he and his camera were always at the right place at the right time. Political consciousness is a rare thing among our film makers; and in this context Anand Patwardhan is both a new name and a new trend in Indian film."
Prabrit Dasmahapatra | Frontier
"Full credit for just the fact of his film in the first place, and then for its spirit and message."
Nissim Ezekiel | The Times of India
"More eloquently the half-hour long film Waves of Revolution speaks for itself – the document is a poignant portrait of an uprising that led to the implementation of the Emergency."
India Today
"Patwardhan’s is a surprisingly mobile camera. It takes up positions behind the speaker’s head and watches crowds, moves with marchers and sneaks past with blurring speed when the police swoop on the marchers."
J.S. Rao | Free Press Journal
