Triveni Rai’s debut feature The Shape of Momo won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Feature at the 24th Los Angeles Indian Film Festival.
“We are honored to award the Grand Jury Prize to this debut novel that deftly portrays a protagonist who lives in the gray area between justice and humility, and delicately depicts her journey to overcome the complexities of class and gender in a place where tradition lives on,” said the feature jury.
The feature jury, consisting of cinematographer Farhad Ahmed Dervi, cinematographer Juan Pablo González and film curator Caroline Libresco, also awarded honorable mentions to Sarmad Sultan Khoosat’s Lali and Seemab Gul’s Ghost School. Regarding “Lari,” the jury said, “Easy and vibrant between genres, the film envelops the audience in a vibrant symphony of music and color.” The jury called “Ghost School” a “beautifully restrained and artistically precise debut that works both as a powerful political allegory and as piercing social realism.”
The Grand Jury Prize for Best Short Film went to ‘Farm Room’, directed by Jasmin Kaur Roy and Avinash Roy. “A delicate and nuanced allegory of the fragility of human relationships in the face of the effects of modernity. The film presents a rarely seen look at rural Punjab, centering humanity and desire. In its succinct 23 minutes, the film takes us alongside the characters in navigating devastating realities,” said the short film jury.
Honorable mention short story went to Ananth Subramaniam’s “Bleat!” and “Permanent Guest” by Sana Zahra Jafri. Short film jury members Malin Kang, film curator, and Alisha Tejpal, filmmaker, commented on “Bleat!” as “an absurdist commentary that questions our understanding of religion, gender, and cultural identity with a highly original vision and surprisingly unexpected approach.” Regarding “Permanent Guest,” the jury said the film “generates immense tension and finds both strength and pain in the unsaid.”
As voted on by festival goers, the Audience Choice Award for Best Feature went to Ben Lekhi and Swetlana’s Breaking the Code, which also opened the festival, while Suraj Paudel’s Rihanna won Best Short.
At IFFLA Industry Days, Amarik Singh Khosa’s project “Blind Tiger” won the Launchpad: Pitch Competition and received a $10,000 development grant. A top-notch crime series set in suburban New Jersey, the story is grounded in classically constructed genre drama with a perspective rarely seen on screen, centering around a highly skilled outsider grounded in the overlooked history of a minority community. The honorable mention went to Priyanka Krishnan and Raman Ninmala’s ‘Tachuru Poo Malaram’ (A Flower Blooms When Touched). The film is a dark comedy about a woman who has carefully constructed her path to an elite arranged marriage and begins to unravel questions of virtue and social performance.
The 24th annual IFFLA, America’s leading platform for South Asian films, screened 27 films consisting of seven narrative features, two documentary features, and 18 shorts, including submissions from countries including India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Japan, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The festival concluded with Anusha Rizvi’s social satire ‘The Great Shamsuddin Family’.
