This Autumn, the BFI will embark on a suspense-filled, UK-wide season BFI THRILLER: WHO CAN YOU TRUST?, running from Friday 20 October – Sunday 31 December at BFI Southbank, online on BFI Player and at selected venues across the UK. Through October and November, BFI’s INDIA ON FILM season will joins forces with BFI THRILLER,
screening four, contemporary Indian thrillers which offer powerful social critique and
richly diverse insights into criminal worlds.

Talvar (Meghna Gulzar, 2015) is a police procedural based on a real-life double
homicide. Starring Irrfan Khan and Konkana Sen Sharma, the film is based on the
2008 Noida double murder case, in which a teenage girl and her family servant were
found murdered and her parents were convicted for the crime. The film is directed by
maverick, female filmmaker, Meghna Gulzar, who is currently directing Dharma
Productions’ Raazi with Alia Bhatt.

NH10 (Navdeep Singh, 2015) is a feminist thriller that sees a woman become a killer
in self-defence, after she and her partner witness an honour killing. The film marked
the first production to emerge from experimental production company, Clean Slate
Films, which was established by powerhouse of Indian cinema, Anushka Sharma,
and her brother, Karnesh Sharma, to pioneer new content for a new India and a
global audience. NH10 emerged a sleeper hit, critically lauded and loved by
audiences.
Cult film Sairat (Nagraj Manjule, 2016) is a revenge saga revolving around a castebased
honour killing, which opened at the Berlin Film Festival and went on to break
domestic, Marathi box office records as well as becoming the first Marathi film to
gross over 100 crore worldwide. Completing the line-up is the Tamil, black comedycrime
film Jigarthanda (Karthik Subbaraj, 2014). The film is part-meta-gangster flick,
part musical and a violent meditation about a filmmaker who becomes a gangster in
order to get his film made.

As part the British Council’s UK-India Year of Culture, the BFI has been celebrating
Indian film throughout 2017. Co-curated by BFI Head Curator Robin Baker, and
writer and programmer Meenakshi Shedde, the BFI’s INDIA ON FILM programme
runs at BFI Southbank until December 2017. Season highlights have included the
Special Gala Screening of Baahubali 2 and the theatrical release of Hotel Salvation
(Mukti Bhavan) among other key events and screenings. Other highlights of the
forthcoming BFI THRILLER season will include UK-wide re-releases of North by
Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959) and The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan
Demme, 1991) and a special day-long event at BFI Southbank on Saturday 11
November – THE BIG THRILL – during, which audiences will be able to dissect the
craft that goes into creating cinematic suspense, explore the nasty women of film
and television, and hear from special guests from in front of and behind the camera.