Such a modest yet whimsical, life-affirming and soulful dream for the loners. He’s the forgotten island and his older partner is the sea (sailor in the fantasy, window cleaner in real life, does it really matter?). Leaving the civilized world. “I’m happy”, Harry whispers to himself as he is soaking in a mossy bathtub of an abandoned house prepared by Flint. The feeling of yearning and the fear of rejection are aching, even a little bit too real, too desperate.…

An apocalyptic hellhole: characters roam across the infertile countryside with dead fish floating on the river under thick white smoke from the chimney, to the mental institution or the phone booth with no one to talk to. The children are all dead; the adults are all abandoned by the other halves. They talk with each other about deaths or the feeling of killing the others. The woman slowly goes backwards and turns into a child; it’s less of a sense…

An actress plays a game where she asks the film crew about some photos of starving people and from which famines they are taken. A villager mocks how this filmmaking group accidentally causes a famine in the village where they shot a movie about famine. With just a few minor details but these have already established what maybe the most sardonic yet politically sensitive work I have seen from Mrinal Sen so far. In the treatment of 1943 Bengal famine,…

Honestly, the most compelling quality about Hunters’ Sense of Touch is how a pink film so deliberately abstract and ambiguous can somehow capture incredibly well repressive obsessive feelings and yearning like this. I can say very few films are able to strike at the very core of homosexual desire as Hunters, and this is a no small accomplishment for a straight filmmaker. Normally, in this type of abstract works in queer cinema (and even in previous queer works of Sato),…