Recap 2023: 10 Best Indie Films In A Year Of Plenty

Recap 2023: The year's top ten niche films that strained to break free from their market-enforced confines

It was an eventful year for Indian mainstream cinema. Moviegoers returned in hordes for the theatrical experience. Blockbusters minted big bucks. SRK ruled the roost like never before. Box-office powerhouses of the South demonstrated their enduring crowd-pulling prowess. Mammootty chose films that made us sit up and marvel. Vidhu Vinod Chopra's 12th Fail soared without the aid of star power. But there were plenty of films out there that made 2023 special. They reaffirmed the beauty of small and independent. They made a strong impact at international film festivals and in the multiplexes (if only in a handful of instances). The year's top ten niche films that strained to break free from their market-enforced confines:

FAMILY

Writer-director-editor Don Palathara does not put a foot wrong in Family, a spare, piercing tale of religious manipulation of a closely-knit rural flock. The impeccably crafted Malayalam film employs strikingly subtle methods to probe the Church's centrality in a village in Kerala's Idukki district, where the guardians of morality close ranks instinctively to shield those that they regard as their own. The central figure (Vinay Forrt) is a man the village cannot do without. A lurking leopard sparks fear. But there is worse afoot in the village that is as quick to condemn and censure as it is to condone. Couched in the film's unerring cultural specificity and social inquisitions are universal truths about human propensities. Family reinforces Palathara's reputation as a filmmaker with a voice entirely his own