MAKING WAVES AT MoMA

The new Indian indie gets showcased in a month-long festival at New York's Museum of Modern Art

- Trisha Gupta

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) distinguishes itself from other visual art museums by taking film as seriously as it does sculpture or painting. MoMA has also long had a keen interest in Indian cinema, especially beyond the mainstream. In 1955, it hosted the world premiere of Pather Panchali, the debut of a then-unknown Satyajit Ray. Since 1972, award-winning Indian filmmakers such as Mani Kaul, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Ketan Mehta have featured at the annual New Directors/ New Films festival.

With India Now in 2007 and The New India in 2009, MoMA presented a wider mix of the popular and the critically-acclaimed. Dibakar Banerjee, Vishal Bhardwaj and Zoya Akhtar jostled with older festival favourites like Bengali auteur Buddhadeb Dasgupta and crowd-pleasing documentaries like Smile Pinki and Supermen of Malegaon.