About

A provocative, multilayered probe into the darker facets of Indian society, coming direct to SXSW Sydney from the Director's Fortnight section at Cannes.

Guru, a young man in his twenties, works in a call center in Agra. In love with Mala, a work colleague, he stills lives with his parents, whose house is divided in two parts: himself on the ground floor with his mother while his father lives upstairs with his mistress. When Guru announces that he wants to marry Mala, and make the terrace of the house his future bedroom, nothing goes as planned.

Programmer's note: Abrasive, provocative, even flirting with horror, Kanu Behl’s Agra is multilayered probe into the darker facets of Indian society. From the suffocating demands of blood ties to the lack of space inherent to overpopulation, as well as the misogyny symptomatic of a country’s crisis in masculinity, the social, the architectural and the psychological are here flattened on the same – insane – plane. Behl gives his film lasting power by building to a fever pitch from the word “go,” turning outlandish scenarios into ruthless allegory.
—Ariel Esteban Cayer

Programmer's note: Don’t expect to see a single shot of the Taj Mahal in Kanu Behl’s disturbing, realistic, yet poignant portrayal of life in India’s most touristic city, Agra. Meet Guru, played brilliantly by newcomer Mohit Agarwal, a man struggling with mental illness who is fervently chasing the same high as every twenty-something, repressed male – love in the form of sex. Co-written by one of India’s top women writers, Atika Chohan, the 2023 Cannes Director’s Fortnight premiering film aptly portrays the sexual frustration and misery of the middle-class Indian men. Actor Priyanka Bose (Gangor, Lion) is in a league of her own, as she plays Guru’s widowed, nymphomaniac love interest.
—Jitin Hingorani