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The Hinduization of India Is Nearly Complete
When the British withdrew from the Indian subcontinent in 1947, paving the way for the independence of the newly partitioned nations of India and Pakistan, the Muslims of the region had a choice. They could resettle in Pakistan, where they would be among a Muslim majority, or remain in India, where they would live as a minority in a majority-Hindu but constitutionally secular state.
For Shah Alam Khan, whose great-grandparents were among the roughly 35 million Muslims who opted to live on the Indian side of the Radcliffe Line in the aftermath of Partition, his family’s decision was in many ways a political gamble. “They didn’t want to go to a theocratic state,” Khan told me from his home in Delhi. Indeed, when Pakistan finally adopted a constitution, nine years after Partition, it enshrined Islam as the state religion. For his family, the promise of a pluralist India, as envisaged by the country’s founders, trumped the warnings of the pro-Partition Muslim League (which went on to become the party of Pakistan’s founders) that a Muslim minority would inevitably be subordinate to the Hindu majority.
Seventy-five years later, those warnings have gained a new prescience. Nominally, India remains a secular state and a multifaith democracy. Religious minorities account for roughly 20 percent of the country’s 1.4 billion people, who include about 200 million Muslims and 28 million Christians. But beneath the country’s ostensible inclusivity runs an undercurrent of Hindu nationalism that has gained strength during the eight-year rule of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The concern shared by many among the country’s religious minorities, as well as by more secular-minded liberals within the Hindu majority, is that the country’s secular and inclusive ethos is already beyond repair.
Muslims and Christians alike have faced a surge in communal violence in recent years. A raft of new laws has reached into their daily lives to interfere with the religious garments they wear, the food they eat, where and how they worship, and even whom they marry. Many of the Indian journalists, lawyers, activists, and religious leaders I’ve spoken with for this article say that the institutions on which the country once relied to keep this kind of ethnic supremacism in check—the courts, opposition parties, and independent media—have buckled.
To Khan, it feels as though the India he has inherited is gradually becoming another version of the theocratic state his family turned away from all those years ago. “They were promised a secular nation,” he said. For them, and for the country’s religious minorities today, “the unmaking of secular India is a betrayal.”
This ideal of a pluralist, secular India is popular not only among its religious minorities. A 2021 study conducted by the Pew Research Center found that by a wide margin, Indians of all faiths consider religious tolerance an essential part of what it means to be “truly Indian.” This civic value is as old as the country itself: Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, rejected any concept of the nation as Hinduism’s answer to Pakistan. His India would not be “formally entitled to any religion as a nation,” he said, but a place where all faiths could coexist and be celebrated equally.
That founding ideology, however, has long been disputed by Hindu nationalists. “To be a Hindu means a person who sees this land, from the Indus River to the sea, as his country but also as his Holy Land,” wrote the politician and activist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in his 1923 book, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (Hindutva, meaning “Hindu-ness,” has become shorthand for Hindu nationalism itself.) In Savarkar’s view, only those who regard India as both their country and their sacred Hindu homeland could be truly Indian. While Christians and Muslims could fulfill the first requirement, of patriotism, they would never be able to achieve the second. “Their holyland is far off in Arabia or Palestine,” Savarkar wrote. “Consequently their names and their outlook smack of a foreign origin. Their love is divided.”
Modi’s own Hindutva credentials run deep. Before he went into mainstream politics with the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, he cut his teeth as a member of its allied paramilitary organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS. After his landslide reelection victory in May 2019, one of the first things he did with his new mandate, in August of that year, was to fulfill a long-standing demand of the RSS by revoking the special autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir, India’s sole Muslim-majority territory (over which Pakistan also claims sovereignty).
That same month, the northeastern BJP-led state of Assam published a national registry that left nearly 2 million people, many of them Muslim, off the list, casting their Indian citizenship into doubt. Perhaps the most contentious decision came at the end of the year, when Modi’s government pressed through a new law granting non-Muslims from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan the right to seek fast-tracked citizenship in India. Critics likened the move to a religious test for citizenship, and warned that it would open the door to additional forms of legal discrimination against Muslims.
These events loom large in Indian politics, but when I spoke with members of India’s Muslim and Christian communities about how life in India has changed under Modi’s rule, they rarely came up. People attested instead to the smaller, often more insidious ways in which the experience of India’s religious minorities has been altered.
To belong to a religious minority in India today is to feel “there is no future,” an Indian Muslim from Kashmir, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of government retaliation, told me. That sentiment is echoed by Ajit Sahi, a former journalist who left India for the United States days after Modi’s reelection. “I have friends who are desperate to get out,” Sahi, a secular-inclined Hindu who now serves as the advocacy director of the Indian American Muslim Council in Washington, D.C., told me. “There is no future for somebody like me back in India.” Nandita Suneja, who moved from her native Delhi to Australia in 2019, told me that the communal tensions made her Hindu family’s decision to leave much easier. She didn’t want to raise her daughter in an “atmosphere of stifling freedom and hate.”
For Indian Muslims, in particular, the situation is dire. During the recently passed holy month of Ramadan, they saw their houses and shops bulldozed, their businesses boycotted, and their religious gatherings heckled by Hindu-nationalist mobs. Open calls for genocide against Muslims have become commonplace, as have violent clashes and lynchings. Although the authorities generally avoid the appearance of explicitly endorsing these kinds of actions, they rarely go out of their way to condemn them. A recent open letter signed by more than 100 former civil servants accused the Indian government of being “fully complicit” in the subordination of the country’s religious minorities as well as in the undermining of the country’s constitution.
Shah Alam Khan, who teaches orthopedic medicine at Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences, considers himself relatively privileged compared with most Indian Muslims, who tend to be among the country’s poorer and more marginalized citizens. But even for him, he says, the country’s majoritarian turn has forced a change in his quotidian habits. He thinks twice before using the greeting Assalamualaikum, or using any other obviously Islamic phrase, in a crowded public space. Asked for his name, he typically offers only Shah, because it’s more common and less identifiably Muslim than his surname.
This type of self-surveillance has affected other members of his family. “Whenever I used to go meet my mom, she used to give me food,” Khan said. “But ever since [Modi] came to power, she stopped giving me that food, because a large part of that food used to be meat.” Cows are considered sacred to the Hindu faith, and their slaughter has been proscribed in most states—a rule often enforced by vigilante mobs. If Khan were stopped by a hostile crowd on suspicion of carrying beef, his mother feared, he could be arrested, even lynched.
Akif—who asked to be identified by only his first name for fear of persecution—grew up in what he describes as comfortable circumstances in Aligarh, southwest of Delhi. But that comfort has slipped in recent years. He won’t leave home wearing traditional Islamic attire if he is going to an unfamiliar neighborhood. His wife, who works in academia, has been asked by colleagues about why she wears a hijab, the Muslim headscarf, and why she doesn’t work at an Islamic institution. Some of the most incendiary comments, Akif says, have come from people he considered friends.
These restrictions, compounded by public debates at the local, state, and even national levels over whether Muslim students should be allowed to wear headscarves in school or how loudly mosques should broadcast the call to prayer (known as the azaan), have left many Indian Muslims feeling unwelcome in their own country. “Initially, they came for our dietary habits, now the azaan,” Rana Ayyub, an Indian Muslim journalist and author, told me. “Everyday you wake up and it’s like, ‘Okay, what part of our identity are you going to attack today?’”
Indian Christians face similar hostility. Attacks on Christians have been rising steadily since 2014, and 2021 was the most violent year on record for the community: The United Christian Forum, an ecumenical organization based in Delhi, reported a tally of more than 500 violent incidents—an 80 percent increase over the previous year. A human-rights lawyer who works on minority-rights and religious-freedom cases, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly about their work, told me that most of these incidents originate with Hindu-nationalist mobs, which descend on religious gatherings at churches and in homes to accuse those involved of forcing Christianity upon unsuspecting Hindus, in violation of the country’s anti-conversion laws. In the violence that ensues, pastors have been beaten, churches vandalized, and religious schools attacked.
In many cases, rather than intervene to maintain public order, police officers join the mobs, ready to arrest the suspected Christian proselytizers. In one incident, on April 14, dozens of worshippers were gathered at a church in the state of Uttar Pradesh to observe Maundy Thursday when a mob showed up with police. “Everyone was arrested,” the lawyer told me. “‘Who are you converting? Everyone is detained.’ It was a little bizarre.” That case is still pending.
Hindu-nationalist groups and BJP lawmakers claim that forced conversions are rampant in the country. But there is little evidence for this. None of the arrests have yet resulted in a single conviction, A. C. Michael, a former member of the Delhi Minorities Commission and the national coordinator of the United Christian Forum, told me. But if the real purpose of the harassment is to intimidate members of a religious minority, it has already had its desired effect. “Earlier, we were very proud to display our faith, like wearing a cross or, if we were traveling, we would say our prayers aloud,” Michael said. “All that has now stopped.”
This is so far from the India that Nehru’s vision promised that Muslims and Christians now have little expectation that the state will protect not just their rights but their very lives. “The year I left India, in 2015, there were several attacks on churches in Delhi,” Dominic Emmanuel, a former spokesperson of the Delhi Catholic Church who is now based in Vienna, Austria, told me. When he and his fellow congregants staged a protest against attacks within their church compound, they were arrested.
Modi’s ruling BJP has no incentive to change course. In March, the party won a resounding victory when it held on to power in Uttar Pradesh, where the government is now led by Yogi Adityanath, a hard-line nationalist and former monk widely seen as Modi’s likely successor. The main opposition party, the Indian National Congress, was once the standard-bearer of secularism in India, but it has failed to mount a strong defense of the country’s religious minorities. Analysts I spoke with attribute part of that failure to the opposition’s fears of alienating a Hindu majority that has been swayed by Hindutva ideology.
If the political system is no longer a check on majoritarian rule, neither is the legal system. Just as the authorities fail to protect minorities from communal violence—or even participate in the violence themselves—the legal system fails to hold officials to account. Worse, a series of draconian and discriminatory laws have recruited both police and courts to efforts to silence government critics and advocates for India’s religious minorities. (The Indian government did not respond to requests for comment.)
At grave personal risk, several Indian journalists have shed unflattering light on Modi’s majoritarian rule. Some have been jailed for their reporting. One is Siddique Kappan, who was charged with sedition and conspiracy to incite violence for trying to report on the gang rape and murder of a 19-year-old Dalit woman. (Dalits, pejoratively known as the “untouchables,” are at the bottom of India’s caste system.) Others, like Ayyub, have been hit with spurious fraud and money-laundering charges; their cases are laborious and expensive to defend. The BJP-controlled state does not need to worry about time or money, so the process is the punishment.
“There is no one left,” Ayyub said, noting that as the country’s high-profile figures in politics, law, and the media have been largely silenced, so, too, have celebrities in India’s entertainment industry. The most prominent example is Shah Rukh Khan, one of Bollywood’s biggest stars, as well as one of the country’s most influential Muslim figures, whose films portray India’s pluralism at its best. Last year, the actor’s son was embroiled in allegations of drug use—a charge seen by some as part of a broader effort by the government to crack down on its critics in the film industry, as well as an attempt to discredit Khan personally.
Khan not only embodies that anathema to the BJP of being a Muslim married to a Hindu, but he has also spoken out against religious intolerance in the country. By attacking a personality like Khan, Ayyub said, the government’s message was clear: “If it can happen to Shah Rukh Khan, the biggest superstar,” she said, “imagine what happens to a regular Muslim without the access.”
That Modi feels emboldened enough to take on a movie star like Khan is telling. Modi “is popular because of the fact that he’s a bigot,” Aakar Patel, the chair of Amnesty International’s India Board and the author of The Price of the Modi Years, told me. “He is seen as somebody who has put Muslims in their place.” Despite rising inflation and high unemployment, as well as the government’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic and democratic backsliding, the prime minister still enjoys widespread popularity with his own BJP-supporting constituency. For most Indians, he is an Indian success story.
“Modi has been a real son of the soil for young Indians and they see themselves in him,” Vivan Marwaha, a researcher in emerging markets and the author of What Millennials Want, told me. If the son of a tea seller can become prime minister and command an international stage, the logic goes, so could they. “His appeal is in his personality,” Marwaha added. “Foreign leaders have to listen to him speaking in Hindi. He sells out stadiums in New York, London, and Sydney.”
Many Hindu Indians also appear comfortable with Modi’s ethnonationalist aims, despite the outbreaks of communal violence. “The whole religious agenda is not seen as something radical because, at the end of the day, something like 80 percent of India’s population is Hindu,” Marwaha said. “People just believe, ‘Well, why can’t they just live with our rules? Why can’t they not eat beef? Why does the azaan need to be played in public places?’ Things like that.”
If no check to the Hinduization of state and society comes from within India, then what about from without? So far, India’s international allies have shown little inclination to call Delhi out over the treatment of its religious minorities, largely because they see India as too important a partner to alienate. This is especially true of the Biden administration, which counts its relationship with India as a strategic asset in its Indo-Pacific strategy.
When Washington has voiced concern about the treatment of religious minorities in India, it has done so in private. That could be starting to change. In April, at a joint press conference with the Indian foreign and defense ministers, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken noted that the United States is monitoring the rise of human-rights abuses in the country. That same month, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a federal body created by Congress in 1998, designated India as a country of “particular concern” for the third year in a row in its annual religious-freedom report, placing India alongside countries such as Afghanistan, China, Iran, Russia, and Pakistan. In India’s case, the commission recommended imposing targeted sanctions against those responsible for severe religious-freedom violations.
Although the commission has no power to enforce such measures, its condemnations may have some cumulative effect. “When your own agency is recommending a policy move for three years in a row, it becomes harder to ignore with each passing year,” Pranay Somayajula, an advocacy and outreach coordinator at Hindus for Human Rights, a group based in Washington, D.C., told me.
As menacing as the persecution of religious minorities has become, for most Indians, emigrating is not an option. Only about 5 percent of citizens have a passport, and those who leave the country tend to be among the wealthiest. “If we decide to abandon the ship, what will happen to people who do not have the resources to go out? That is a very big concern,” Akif told me. As the last of his siblings still living in India, he can’t bring himself to leave his parents behind.
For Shah Alam Khan, remaining is a point of principle too. Because he spent several years working as a doctor for the National Health Service in Britain, he could emigrate there. But doing so would hand the nationalists who don’t see him as a true Indian a win. “It’s like running away. I won’t do that,” he said. “This is my country at the end of the day.”
‘The Kashmir Files’ movie review: A disturbing take which grips and gripes in turns
Once upon a time, writer-director Vivek Agnihotri told us a Hate Story; this week, he has etched yet another. Mounted like a revisionist docudrama, that tracks the tragic exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from their homeland in the 1990s, The Kashmir Files is essentially a battle of narratives, where Agnihotri has determinedly sided with one version of the events. Employing some facts, some half-truths, and plenty of distortions, it propels an alternative view about the Kashmir issue, with the intent to not just provoke… but incite.
The Kashmiri Pandits’ pain is real and should be expressed in popular culture, but it deserved a more nuanced, more objective take rather than the ‘us vs them’ worldview that Agnihotri has propagated over 170 minutes.
The film is based on the testimonies of the people scarred for generations by the insurgency in the State, and presents the tragic exodus as a full-scale genocide, akin to the Holocaust, that was deliberately kept away from the rest of India by the media, the ‘intellectual’ lobby and the government of the day because of their vested interests.
Agnihotri has improved upon the form he adopted in The Tashkent Files where he presented his take on former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death through memories and flashbacks, with the narrative going back and forth in time.
Here, Krishna (Darshan Kumar), a Kashmiri Pandit and student of a premier university, modelled on Jawaharlal Nehru University, has been tutored by his ‘liberal’ teacher Radhika Menon (Pallavi Joshi) into believing that the secessionist movement in Kashmir is akin to India’s Freedom Movement.
When Krishna’s grandfather Pushkar Nath (Anupam Kher) dies, he returns to Kashmir with his ashes and meets four of his grandfather’s friends who reveal the ‘real’ story of Kashmir to Krishna, and of course, the audience. In their narrative, Kashmir was faced with a clash of civilisations, and the Pandits were left to die by the State and the central government to appease one community. The villain of the piece is Bitta, who seems like a combination of real-life Ghulam Mohammad Dar alias Bitta Karate and Yasin Malik, the faces of terror outfit Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front.
Unlike Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s films on the subject, Agnihotri has no time for romance in the Valley. It is more like a rejoinder to Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider, as the film tries to suggest that the Kashmiri Muslims deserved to suffer after what they did to the Pandits and other minorities.
A disturbing take, it grips and gripes in turns. The scenes of bloodshed, torture, and otherisation of Pandits have been filmed with brutal intensity. The camerawork captures the dark, brooding shades of the Valley and the performances are compelling.
As the conscience keeper of the film, Kher is at his rhetorical best. Darshan is a revelation and it is good to see the gifted Pallavi back. Mithun Chakraborty, Prakash Belawadi, Puneet Issar, and Atul Shrivastava sound convincing, as friends of Pushkar Nath.
However, the film that accuses the foreign press of milking choreographed unrest and clickbait headlines, gradually falls for the same alleged exploitative methods to reach out to tear ducts and arouse animosity. There is hardly any effort to understand what happens when a majority becomes the minority and vice versa. The voice of the moderate Muslim is conspicuous by its absence. The representation of the educated elite is shallow and towards the end borders on easy character assassination.
Some of the dialogues give hope that Agnihotri will address the complexity of the subject that hasn’t been addressed before, but once he starts peddling an agenda against a religion, The Kashmir Files loses its objective, humanistic gaze.
It does the same selective treatment of the period that it accuses the players in the ‘90s of.
Like most in the era of social media, Agnihotri looks at the past from the prism of today and a lot of dinner table discussions make it to the screenplay. There is no middle ground for him, as he picks and chooses instances from the past to suit his narrative. He talks of Sheikh Abdullah, but doesn’t mention the role played by Raja Hari Singh at the time of the accession of Kashmir to India. He also doesn’t talk about how the rigged ballot gave way to a bullet culture in Kashmir in the late 1980s.
The film underplays the Pakistan-Afghanistan angle and puts the onus for perpetuating the insurgency on the local Muslim. In Agnihotri’s documentation, terror has a religion and it appears every Muslim in Kashmir has been a separatist and keen to convert Hindus to Islam. How the Dogra Kings ruled the State till 1947 is out of the syllabus here.
Of course, religious slogans were raised, and indeed Kashmir Pandits got caught in the crossfire between India and Pakistan, but the history is not as black and white as Agnihotri wants us to believe.
The names of Kashmiri legends and their contribution that Krishna invokes in the climactic speech are very much there in history books and oral tradition. If the makers got to know them during the research for the film, it is not fair to tell the audience that they have not been taught about the mystic Lalleshwari, the journey of Shankaracharya to Kashmir, and the intellectual capital of the State.
Talking selective use of facts, the film directly attacks Farooq Abdullah and Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, and indirectly holds Congress responsible for the exodus, but conveniently forgets to tell us that it was the National Front government that was in power in January 1990, when the alleged genocide took place, whose survival depended on the outside support of the Bharatiya Janta Party and the Left parties.
He has also conveniently forgotten the party, whose agenda he is consciously or inadvertently perpetuating, had formed the government with one of the regional parties which the films describe as nationalist in Delhi, communalist in Srinagar.
Curiously, the film talks of justice but doesn’t bring in the role of the judiciary, the legal battle of Pandits, and the fact that the real Bitta spent more than two decades in jail and after being out on bail, is once again behind the bars.
In the bid to distort, even the good old poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz is not spared. Written in 1979, Hum Dekhenge uses the metaphor of traditional Islamic imagery to subvert and challenge Pakistani General Zia Ul Haq’s fundamentalist interpretation of them. When he says “An-al-Haq” (I am truth), he comes close to the Advaita philosophy of Hinduism. The film subtly derides previous Prime Ministers like Atal Bihari Vajpayee for aiming to win the hearts of people. Perhaps, the makers believe in ruling only the landmass.
One fears, in the name of street justice, the clippings of the film will soon end up in social media to fuel further hate against one community.
The Kashmir Files is currently running in theatres
Google Play is stripped of movie and TV show sales
Google Play Movies TV—and the Google Play brand in general—seems doomed. Google already pulled the Play Movies TV app from Rokus and other smart TV platforms last year, and it will now remove the Movies TV section from the Play Store. The Play Store, which used to offer a large collection of content, now only sells apps and books.
Google posted a message to the Google Play Help community saying that the Movies TV Play Store section will shut down in May 2022 and that the Google TV app will be the new home for buying movie and TV content from Google on phones and tablets. The company also sells video content through YouTube, and when it shut down the Google Play Movies TV app on smart TVs, Google pitched the YouTube app as its replacement for purchased content.So when you buy video content from Google, you use the Google TV or Google Play Movies TV app to play content on Android, the Google Play Movies TV app on iOS, and the YouTube app on third-party smart TVs like Roku. “Google TV” isn’t just the name of the phone app and video content store; it’s also the new name of Android TV OS, which you can get on the new Chromecast (it’s also integrated into some Sony and TCL television sets). On those devices, your purchases are built into the operating system. Google Play Movies TV will be completely dead if Google chooses to shut down the phone apps, and that seems inevitable at this point.
The move is the latest step in Google’s sunsetting of Google Play. The company hasn’t officially announced that it wants to kill the brand yet, but a suspicious amount of Google Play services are being turned off. Google Play launched in 2012 as a home for all of Google’s content. Android apps and games, music, books, movies, TV shows, and magazines could all be bought in a unified Play Store interface, and a collection of content playback apps allowed users to access each library type. It seems that Google gave up on this idea at some point. Google Play Newsstand was shut down and merged into Google News in 2018, and Play Music was shut down in 2020 in favor of YouTube Music. Google Play Movies TV seems next on the list. With the removal of purchases from the Play Store and the app from smart TVs, only the phone app is left.On the Play Store, that leaves apps, games, and books. Google Play Books does not have an alternative home yet, but don’t be surprised to hear about one soon.
All Aboard! Full Trailer for ‘Bullet Train’ Action Movie with Brad Pitt
All Aboard! Full Trailer for ‘Bullet Train’ Action Movie with Brad Pitt
by Alex Billington
March 2, 2022
Source: YouTube
“There’s nothing simple about this job.” Here we go! Sony Pictures has dropped the full trailer for Bullet Train, an action movie set on a Japanese bullet train pulling into theaters this summer. We featured the viral ad teaser last week to build hype. The plot involves five assassins aboard this train who discover their missions all have something in common. An original movie event, Bullet Train is a fun, delirious action-thriller from the director of Deadpool 2, David Leitch. Brad Pitt headlines an ensemble cast of eclectic, diverse assassins – all with connected yet conflicting objectives – set against the backdrop of a non-stop ride through modern-day Japan. The big cast also includes Sandra Bullock (“Maria Beetle”), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (“Tangerine”), Joey King (“Prince”), Zazie Beetz, Logan Lerman, Michael Shannon, Brian Tyree Henry (“Lemon”), Hiroyuki Sanada, Andrew Koji (“Kimura”), Masi Oka and Andrea Muñoz. Might be one of the best trailers of the year. I am SO in for this. Looks incredibly good! All aboard.
Here’s the full official trailer (+ poster) for David Leitch’s Bullet Train, direct from Sony’s YouTube:
For more info, follow the Nippon Speed Line pages – @nipponspeedline on Instagram and on YouTube here.
Five assassins find themselves on a Japanese bullet train, realizing that their individual assignments are all interconnected. Bullet Train is directed by American stuntman / filmmaker David Leitch, director of the films John Wick, Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, and Fast Furious Presents: Hobbs Shaw previously; he also works as a stunt coordinator stuntman. The screenplay is written by Zak Olkewicz, adapted from Kôtarô Isaka’s novel. Produced by Antoine Fuqua, David Leitch, and Kelly McCormick. Sony Pictures will release Leitch’s Bullet Train movie in theaters starting July 29th, 2022 this summer. Ready to see more?
Japanese Teaser for Makoto Shinkai’s New Film ‘Suzume no Tojimari’
Japanese Teaser for Makoto Shinkai’s New Film ‘Suzume no Tojimari’
by Alex Billington
April 12, 2022
Source: YouTube
Opening our imaginations this November. Toho in Japan has revealed the first 45-second teaser trailer for Suzume no Tojimari, the latest from acclaimed animation filmmaker Makoto Shinkai – best known for his films Your Name and Weathering with You recently. The title roughly translates to Suzume’s Door-Locking or Closing Suzume’s Door, involving mysterious doors that open all over Japan. This is currently set for release in Japan in November, but has no other international dates yet. A modern action adventure road story where a 17-year-old girl named Suzume helps a mysterious young man close doors from the outer side that are releasing disasters all over in Japan. The anime film features character design by Masayoshi Tanaka, art direction by Takumi Tanji, and animation by Kenichi Tsuchiya, but no voice cast has been confirmed yet. This is a lovely first look teaser, with some of Shinkai’s signature shots and style on display. I’m still not entirely sure what she will discover behind this door, but I’m very curious to see more footage.
Here’s the first Japanese teaser (+ posters) for Makoto Shinkai’s Suzume no Tojimari, from YouTube:
“We must think about how to close the many doors we left open. I’ve bestowed that responsibility upon Suzume as she travels across Japan closing various doors. It is my sincere hope that this film leaves its audiences with big smiles and excitement as they walk out of the theater.”
—Makoto Shinkai
Suzume, a 17-year-old girl living in a quiet town in Kyushu meets a young man on the road who says, “I’m looking for a door.” Suzume follows him and finds a door in an abandoned building in the mountains. It was as if it was the only place left standing after the collapse. An old, worn-out door. As if drawn by something, Suzume reaches for the door… Soon, doors begin to open one after another all over Japan. But, as misfortune will come from the other side of the door. The door that opens must be closed, they say. “The stars, the setting sun, and the morning sky. The place where I wandered into… There was a sky where all time seemed to melt together.” Led by the mysterious door, Suzume’s “journey of closing the door” begins. Suzume no Tojimari or すずめの戸締まり, roughly translated as Suzume’s Door Closing, is both written and directed by acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Makoto Shinkai, of the films The Place Promised in Our Early Days, 5 Centimeters Per Second, Children Who Chase Lost Voices, The Garden of Words, Your Name, and Weathering with You previously previously. This new film is set to open first in Japan starting November 2022 this fall. No US release has been set – stay tuned. Head to the film’s official website. First impression?
‘Eight Stories, One Roar’ – First Trailer for ‘Roar’ Series About Women
‘Eight Stories, One Roar’ – First Trailer for ‘Roar’ Series About Women
by Alex Billington
March 24, 2022
Source: YouTube
“What’s the reason for returning your husband?” Apple has unveiled an official trailer for new streaming series called Roar, a narrative series coming to Apple TV+ this April. Featuring an all-star cast, this genre-bending anthology series weaves together eight darkly comedic feminist fables that each take unexpected approaches to topics including gender roles, autonomy, and identity. Roar stars Nicole Kidman, Cynthia Erivo, Issa Rae, Merritt Wever, Alison Brie, Betty Gilpin, Meera Syal, Fivel Stewart, and Kara Hayward. “How they emerge from their respective journeys speaks to the resiliency that exists within themselves, and with all women.” The description is a bit vague because each of the eight episodes will tell a different story, each unique, about women and “what it means to be a woman today.” The trailer introduces each of them and the stories – it looks way better than it sounds. Give the trailer a watch to get a better idea.
Here’s the first official trailer (+ poster) for Apple TV+’s series Roar, direct from YouTube:
Based on the book by best-selling author Cecelia Ahern and led by a star-studded cast of female talent in front of and behind the camera, Roar explores female experiences that many women have but rarely talk about. Through these 8 stories, each episode uses magical realism and delivers an insightful, poignant, and sometimes hilarious portrait of what it means to be a woman today. Featuring a unique blend of magical realism, familiar domestic and professional scenarios, and futuristic worlds, these eight stories mirror the dilemmas of ordinary women in accessible yet surprising ways. How they emerge from their respective journeys speaks to the resiliency that exists within themselves, and with all women. Roar is a series created by writers Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch. Based on the book by Cecelia Ahern. The series is executive produced by Cecelia Ahern, Jodi Matterson, Liz Flahive, Allie Goss, Steve Hutensky, Nicole Kidman, Carly Mensch, Bruna Papandrea, Theresa Park, and Per Saari. Apple will debut the “insightful” new Roar series streaming on Apple TV+ starting April 15th, 2022 coming soon this spring. Who’s interested?
New US Trailer for Peculiar Italian Adventure ‘The Tale of King Crab’
New US Trailer for Peculiar Italian Adventure ‘The Tale of King Crab’
by Alex Billington
March 24, 2022
Source: YouTube
“A man who kills, where does he go?” Oscilloscope Labs has revealed an official US trailer for a peculiar, fascinating little Italian film called The Tale of King Crab. This one originally premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, and it also stopped by the Karlovy Vary, New York, and Vienna Film Festivals last year. When this begins, elderly hunters are reminiscing about the local tale of Luciano. Luciano lived as a wandering drunkard in a remote village. Spiteful actions ensue between him and the prince of the region over passage through an ancient gateway. Fueled by passions and jealousy, these actions result in a horrible misdeed. Now an unfortunate criminal, Luciano is exiled to the distant Tierra del Fuego where, with the help of ruthless gold-diggers, he searches for a mythical treasure, paving his way towards redemption. However, in these lands, only greed and insanity can prevail. Starring Gabriele Silli, Maria Alexandra Lungu, Ercole Colnago, and Bruno di Giovanni. This looks like something lost in time. I’ve been hearing many good things about the film since last year – definitely need to check it out soon.
Here’s the official US trailer (+ poster) for Rigo de Righi Zoppis’ The Tale of King Crab, from YouTube:
Luciano is a wandering outcast in a remote, late 19th-century Italian village. His life becomes undone by alcohol, forbidden love, and a bitter conflict with the prince of the region over the right of passage through an ancient gateway. When the quarrel escalates, Luciano is exiled to the distant Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego where, with the help of ruthless gold-diggers, he searches for a mythical treasure, paving his way toward redemption. However, in these barren lands, only greed and insanity can prevail. The Tale of King Crab, originally known as Re Granchio in Italian, is co-directed by filmmakers Alessio Rigo de Righi Matteo Zoppis, both directors of the doc film Il solengo previously, as well as numerous other short films. The screenplay is also by Alessio Rigo de Righi Matteo Zoppis, from a story by Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis and Tommaso Bertani and Carlo Lavagna. The film initially premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival playing in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar. Oscope Labs will debut The Tale of King Crab in select US theaters starting on April 15th, 2022. For more info, visit their official site. Interested?
23 Book Scenes So Controversial They Weren’t Included In The Movie Adaptation
After bratty Eustace gets changed into a dragon, he learns his lesson about being more grateful for what he has and Aslan shows up to change him back. The scene is essentially the same in both the book and the movie, with just one difference.
In the movie, Aslan claws at the sand three times, which causes Eustace’s scales to slowly tear away. He then roars, and Eustace is fully changed back to a boy.
In the book, Aslan first tells Eustace to “undress”. Eustace starts clawing at his own dragon skin, which starts peeling off. He keeps tearing away layers of his skin until he gives up, seeing no significant change. Then Aslan steps in and starts clawing at his body, tearing away more skin.
While the movie shows dazzling golden light as the skin transforms, the book is much more literal. Eustace says it “hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt,” and compares it to peeling off a scab. Since the whole thing is one big metaphor anyway, it makes sense why the filmmakers made the changes they did. You can check out the movie version here.