Fantastic India highlights some of the country’s best genre short films

Fantastic Fest, the Austin, Texas institution vying for the title of “largest genre film festival in the United States,” is so firmly associated with mayhem, mischief, and debauchery that one might occasionally forget about the movies themselves. In its 20th year of operation, though, the event should be thought of as a cultural center and place of learning, too. In between grungy, grimy horror movies, astonishing action flicks, and ineffable bizarro whatsits that defy simple categorization, curious attendees can educate themselves on pockets of world cinema that don’t usually see daylight stateside.

Last year’s fest, for instance, featured a sidebar in its short film program called Arab Genre Rises, highlighting “a new generation of Arab filmmakers” from around the world. This year, that block was represented as Fantastic India, with the same intention as Arab Genre Rises: emphasizing filmmakers from India and the Indian diaspora, each telling stories rooted in the folkloric, political, and cultural markers comprising their backgrounds. Indian cinema makes only rare appearances in American theaters, even in our arthouses—the spaces one would expect to play foreign movies for open-minded domestic audiences. Pictures like Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light are, frankly, the exceptions that prove the rule.

Fantastic India, exhibited in partnership with Austin’s Indie Meme and Mumbai’s Wench Film Festival, functioned as a classroom of sorts, where festival goers either unaware of, or cursorily familiar with, Indian filmmaking received a rich, varied, and especially exuberant schooling on the nation’s genre cinema, right alongside Austin’s well-versed crowds. “We have people who love Indian film and Indian genre film,” explains veteran Fantastic Fest shorts curator Jean Lauer, “and I don't think we still do, but for a while we had a theater down south that used to play Bollywood films, no subtitles, because we had enough people that would go see them.” (Per the Indian community site Austin Indian: if one wants to see Rishab Shetty’s Kantara: A Legend - Chapter 1, which opened in theaters Oct. 2, they only need to drive 30 minutes outside of Austin.)

Not speaking any of the languages common in Bollywood films herself—chiefly Hindi paired with Hindustani, and occasionally such tongues as Punjabi, Marathi, and, yes, English, too—Lauer attended such a screening herself and had a grand time on account of the setting. “You don’t need to (speak Hindi) to just enjoy being in that environment.” Nonetheless, Lauer, a professor in the departments of philosophy, religion, and humanities, and radio-television-film at Austin Community College, notes that the bulk of these audiences fit the former “lesser read” designations, which in a roundabout way works in the festival’s favor. “Most of our audience doesn't know anything about (Indian genre film) unless they've seen it at Fantastic Fest,” Lauer says. “So we get to show that block. It has a lot of weight in some ways. And it’s really fun! We’re finally getting to share these films with people.”

Sci-fi, horror, comedy; silly, spooky, splattery. The shorts assembled by Lauer and fellow Fantastic Fest shorts curator Varun Raman cover wide ground in terms of aesthetics and tone, fitting for a block representing the country that’s ranked third in the world for “most languages spoken.” Film, like speech, is an endlessly versatile communications medium—a hypothesis that need not be proven, but which the filmmakers of Fantastic India did anyways: Adesh Prasad (Demons), Simret Cheema-Innis (From Me to You), Sapna Moti Bhavnani (Landfills of Desire), Vijesh Rajan and Yashoda Parthasarthy (The Last Ride), Yash Saraf (Moti), Virat Pal (Night of the Bride), Nidhi Reddy (Rajas & the Wolf Girl), and Aditya Nair (Whodunit).

Given its reputation as a locus for genre, the immediate expectation of these shorts is an adherence to formula. But none of these films are what they seem to be, to frequently delightful effect. Night of the Bride remolds a nightmarish arranged marriage into the shape of a ghoulish revenge plot; The Last Ride smuggles gig economy critiques into a classic campfire story; a paranoiac depiction of drug addiction gives way to a gruesome nationalist gut punch in Demons; an allegory about othering gets animated in Rajas & the Wolf Girl. If there’s a thread tying the collection together, it is exactly that: othering, or the state of being othered. “Reflecting on it,” Lauer says, “many of (the shorts) are concerned with social norms, expectations, where those are working, or in most cases not working for people.”

The theme was a happy accident. What Lauer and Raman set out to do with Fantastic India was emphasize diversity in as many ways as possible—gender diversity, in front of and behind the camera, as well as language diversity, regional diversity, and a diversity of styles and genres. Lauer originally reached out to her friends at Indie Meme, who she’s conducted Q&As for at festivals past. They in turn put her in touch with Bhavnani, who founded Wench Film Festival in 2021. Through the selection process, the collective succeeded in making their broad illustration of Indian genre cinema’s possibilities, and a platform for the filmmakers, too. The “othering” motif linking each short together was organic, unexpected, but of course, not unwelcome.

Bhavnani’s Landfills of Desire, a sumptuous Gothic visual poem about a wandering rantas, a Kashmiri witch, narrated by American independent filmmaker, writer, and actor Toby Poser, digs into the “other” theme in its own mournful, haunting way—but her thoughts on how Western audiences and critics receive Indian movies drives it home. “So few of our films are being made, and even fewer shown or spoken about in Western countries,” Bhavnani says. “Hence Fantastic India was so important.”