India

This titan of world cinema, arguably India’s most celebrated director, made deeply humanistic films that explore the effects of modernization and the tensions within Bengali society.

Tradition and modernity collide in the sensuous films of this Indian American director, whose vibrant portraits of urban life and cross-cultural conflict give voice to people navigating an increasingly globalized world.

The front man of the band Neon Indian—who just released his debut solo album, World of Hassle—praises the “completely demented” Maîtresse, discusses the representation of Texas in True Stories, and gives us his best Peter Falk impression.

Akin Adeṣọkan is the author of Roots in the Sky, a novel, and Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics. He teaches cinema and comparative literature at Indiana University Bloomington.

Ira Bhaskar is a professor of cinema studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has written widely on melodrama, Indian cinema, and other subjects, and is a coauthor of Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema (2009). She is currently editing...

Vida T. Johnson is professor of Russian film and culture at Tufts University and the co-author, with Graham Petrie of The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue, Indiana University Press, 1994.

Peter Bondanella is the chairman of West European Studies at the University of Indiana at Bloomington, and is the author of The Cinema of Federico Fellini (Princeton).

Jun 23, 2026 — “Ozone Hole over Baltimore?” queries a panicky 1992 headline in the Baltimore Sun. Sure, as the article clarifies, the Maryland metropolis, eternal home base of trash icon John Waters, is no more vulnerable to ozone depletion than any other city...

Jun 22, 2026 — Deep Dives In 1971, upon the release of his first and only feature film, James Bidgood pulled a disappearing act. He had spent the better part of seven years shooting Pink Narcissus, a hallucinatory tale of a daydreaming gay hustler, on...

Jun 9, 2026 — Over the course of four decades, the great Mauritanian French filmmaker Med Hondo created a stylistically diverse, politically trenchant body of work that frequently tapped into his own Pan-African roots and explored the existential and material stresses of Black people...