u/_Sigmaa

Hi everyone,

I want to introduce TalkiesDB.com — a database and community platform focused entirely on Indian regional cinema. Not Bollywood-as-an-afterthought-to-everything-else, but Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Assamese, Manipuri, Khasi, and other Northeast Indian cinemas as the actual point.

The frustration that started this: try finding a proper festival history for a Manipuri film, or a curated list of Bengali Parallel Cinema, or accurate award data for a Marathi director, on IMDb or Letterboxd. It's either missing, wrong, or buried three clicks deep behind Bollywood content. So I built the thing I wanted to exist.

What's actually on there right now:

• Deep movement pages — Malayalam New Wave, Bengali Parallel Cinema, Marathi New Wave, Hindi Parallel Cinema, and more being added
• A festival circuit layer tracking Indian films at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, TIFF, Sundance, and other festivals — sections, awards, screening history
• Editorial "Stories" — long-form pieces like festival deep-dives (India at Cannes, 1946–2024 is live)
• Ratings, reviews, watchlists, curated lists — the usual cataloging stuff, but scoped to cinema that usually gets ignored
• A contributor system, because this kind of database is genuinely better when built with people who actually know this cinema better than any scraper does

Why this subreddit: I wanted a place to actually talk about this stuff, not just log it. Recommendations, "why isn't X in the Y movement," festival news, hot takes on regional cinema getting flattened into "world cinema" categories on every other platform — all of it belongs here.

If you've got a favorite regional film that you've never been able to find proper info on anywhere, drop it below — genuinely curious what gaps to go fill next.

It's been a while since Cannes 2024, enough time that the initial wave of "historic moment for Indian cinema" coverage has settled and we can actually talk about the film and what it did or didn't change.

The facts, for anyone who wants the full picture:

Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine as Light competed at the 77th Cannes Film Festival in May 2024 — the first Indian film in the main competition in thirty years, since Shaji N. Karun's Swaham in 1994. It won the Grand Prix, the festival's second-highest award after the Palme d'Or (which went to Sean Baker's Anora that year). Kapadia became the first Indian filmmaker to win the Grand Prix at all. The jury that year was headed by Greta Gerwig, and the film shared the room with new work from Coppola, Sean Baker, Lanthimos, Schrader, and Sorrentino — not exactly a soft field.

It's worth remembering this wasn't Kapadia's first Cannes rodeo either. Her documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing won the Golden Eye for Best Documentary at Cannes back in 2021. All We Imagine as Light is her fiction feature debut.

The film itself follows three women connected through a Mumbai hospital — Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a nurse whose husband has been unreachable in Germany for years and who receives a strange, unexplained gift from him; her younger roommate Anu (Divya Prabha), navigating a relationship she has to keep hidden; and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), an older cook facing eviction from the flat she's lived in for decades. It's a Malayalam-and-Hindi film, an India/France/Netherlands/Luxembourg co-production, and reportedly took root during Kapadia's time at Cannes' own Cinéfondation residency back in 2019 — so this was years in the making before it ever hit a red carpet.

Where it gets more interesting: the after-Cannes stretch.

After the Grand Prix, the film picked up Best Film at the Asian Film Awards in Hong Kong in 2025 and got nominations at the Golden Globes (Best Director, Best Foreign Language Film). But it lost at the Golden Globes, lost at BAFTA (Best Film Not in the English Language went to Emilia Pérez instead), and lost at Critics Choice too. Three fairly high-profile misses in a row after the biggest win of the director's career.

A few things worth actually discussing here, beyond just "did it deserve to win more":

1. Cannes prestige vs. the Western awards-circuit machine. This isn't a new pattern — plenty of Cannes competition and even Palme d'Or winners go on to get shut out of the Globes/BAFTA/Oscar conversation because that circuit runs on campaign spend, distributor muscle, and voter-base familiarity, not festival-jury taste. Is that simply what happened here, or was there something specific — distribution reach, unfamiliarity with the cast, the film's quietness as a hard sell to a broader voting body — that hurt it more than it would a European arthouse equivalent?
2. What "historic" actually bought Indian cinema. Thirty years between competition slots is a long gap. Does one Grand Prix win meaningfully open the door wider for Indian films at Cannes going forward, or does it risk becoming a "moment" that gets cited in retrospectives without actually shifting how often India gets a competition slot? Worth checking back in a few years and seeing if this was an opening or an outlier.
3. The film vs. the narrative around the film. A lot of the coverage last year leaned heavily on the "first Indian film in 30 years" framing, understandably. But that can crowd out actual discussion of the film on its own terms — three women, a hospital, an unreachable husband, an eviction notice, a story that's reportedly built more on atmosphere and restraint than plot momentum. For people who've actually sat with it: does it hold up as a film independent of the historic-context hook, or does the context do a lot of the heavy lifting for how it's remembered?

Genuinely curious where people land, especially anyone who's rewatched it since the initial festival-circuit noise died down. Does it feel like one of the defining Indian films of the decade, or a very good film that got amplified by an unusually symbolic Cannes moment?

All imagine as light