COURT

COURT

1:003:457:009:30

Wednesday, July 15 - Tuesday, July 28

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY CHAITANYA TAMHANE

Winner of top prizes at the Venice and Mumbai Film Festivals. COURT’s understated yet profoundly moving drama unfolds within the Indian legal system where issues of caste, patriarchy and feudalism are all specific to that culture. But at least as important are the more universal issues of bureaucratic idiocy, the apathy of the haves regarding the lives of the have-nots, and the still-Dickensian nature of most judicial processes. The film’s director writes about the reality that inspired him: “The sheer lack of drama and the casualness with which life and death decisions were being made, was what sparked my imagination. Every face has a story of its own: the stenographer who disinterestedly types away all day, the peon who runs errands for a small bribe, the inarticulate lawyers reading out long, technical passages from outdated law books, the appellants who have probably spent years waiting for their case number to be called out.” 

INDIA • 2014 • 116 MINS. • IN MARATHI, HINDI, ENGLISH AND GUJARATI WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES • ZEITGEIST FILMS

REVIEWS

WINNER!
India’s National Film Award, 2015

“What starts as an absurdist comedy soon blooms into a searing evisceration of India’s legal system.”
– Time Out NY

“A powerful and richly praised new Indian film…(that) lays bare some of the deep dysfunctions of the Indian judiciary… The film is as much commentary as cinema. More than a thousand of India’s laws date back to the British Raj… (The filmmaker) plays these incongruities for mordant laughs. (His) admonitions of India’s judiciary are not delivered clinically; instead, with immense skill, he works them under the skin of his movie, allowing the story to shine. The cast…is a marvel of verisimilitude, and Tamhane fleshes out his characters with loving attention to their lives outside the courtroom.”  
- Samanth Subramanian, The New Yorker online

 “If India’s judges attacked their backlog nonstop – with no breaks for eating or sleeping – and closed 100 cases every hour, it would take more than 35 years to catch up.” 
 – Bloomberg Businessweek (January 2015)