India: Matri Bhumi

Director: Roberto Rossellini

1959 / 90min / DCP

Co-written with Iranian diplomat (and onetime Cahiers du cinéma contributor!) Fereydoun Hoveyda and luminously photographed by cinematographer Aldo Tonti, Rossellini’s pivotal India: Matri Bhumi is a work of poetic ethnofiction, a string of five vignettes that travel from the teeming streets of Mumbai to the rural villages of the Subcontinent, unified by their abiding interest in the confrontation between human beings and the natural world, and by the filmmaker’s enormous tenderness for his subjects. “I tried to express the soul, the light inside these people, their reality, which is a reality that is absolutely intimate, unique, and attached to an individual, with all the sense of his surroundings.” —Rossellini

"India: Matri Bhumi is a film in which the distinction between reality and fiction gradually loses significance. The people filmed do not seem like they are 'acting'; rather they simply inhabit the film. This merging, or hybridity of genres, produces something profoundly cinematic. With Rossellini, we feel a kind of cinema that is not trying to explain the world but to pass through it and allow itself to be transformed. Observation becomes imagination. The real continuously opens itself to the invisible. Cinema ceases to be representation of the world and becomes the creation of the world." —Gianfranco Rosi

Distributor: Janus Films

Part of Gianfranco Rosi: Firmament of the Real