Shankar's Fairies. 2021. India. Directed by Irfana Majumdar. In Hindi; English subtitles. 93 min.
In her delicately composed, heartrending debut fiction feature, Irfana Majumdar recreates the meticulous, cloistered world of a young girl growing up in a privileged household in India in the early 1960s. The sensitive child of a senior police official, Anjana (Shreeja Mishra) forges a close bond with her parents’ servant, Shankar (Jaihind Kumar), who acts kindly toward her though he remains separated from his own daughter, who lives back in his village. Evoking her mother’s childhood memories, Majumdar dramatizes intimate moments that quietly, persuasively speak to the country’s deeply entrenched caste system and lingering colonialist mindset, while also using the camera to capture the beauty and tactility of the girl’s physical world.