ANNIE RESURRECTED

Arundhati Roy and Pradip Krishen's In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones has been restored by Film Heritage Foundation and will premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival

- Arshia

In her recently published memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy dedicates a whole chapter to the 1989 English-language Doordarshan film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, for which she had won a National Award for best screenplay. Set in 1974, Annie is the story of dreamers, drawing heavily on Roy’s time at Delhi’s School of Planning and Architecture. It follows Anand ‘Annie’ Grover, played by Arjun Raina, who imagined trees planted along train tracks getting fertilised by the faeces of the poor who defecated there, with the sprinklers of passing trains watering them, as a means to achieving utopia. Over the years, Annie and its zany idealism quietly lived on in the annals of the internet in a patchy print, gathering a cult following. Now, 37 years after its release, Annie has finally been restored by the Film Heritage Foundation, and is slated to premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival on February 16.