Why Sunrise is an important film

Revolving around human trafficking, Partho Sen-Gupta’s psychological thriller Sunrise investigates what has perpetually degraded humankind, writes Ananya Borgohain

The NGO CRY (Child Rights and You) estimated that on an average in India, around 180 children go missing every day. Referring to data assembled by the Union Home Ministry, the NGO stated that the total number of untraced children in 2015 was 62,988 as against 34,244 in 2013. The number of children who went missing and were never found saw an increase of 84 per cent in two years.

Partho Sen-Gupta’s Sunrise (Arunudoy) therefore comes at the right time and tugs at the core of the viewer’s heart with a thought provoking message. This surreal psychological thriller chronicles the saga of a cop, lakshman Joshi (Adil Hussain) who struggles with the guilt of his school going daughter Aruna’s disappearance. Shot almost entirely at the dead of the night and quite often under torrential rain, the tone and tenor of the film is in direct contrast with its title. Joshi’s meandering ordeal on the murky, abandoned bylanes of Mumbai blurs the line of difference between reality and illusion. The parallel plot of a mysterious dance bar called Paradise and the daily fears and trauma of the young women serving as dancers at Paradise unfurl an emotional upheaval that makes it difficult to distinguish imagination from reality. The irony of naming the ghetto of human decadence Paradise is inescapable.

Tannishtha Chatterjee’s portrayal of an anguished and psychologically disturbed mother (leela) who has not yet come to terms with her daughter’s disappearance is moving and unsettles the image of the progressive city that Mumbai is deemed to be. In spite of a minimal cast, Sunrise destabilises all settled notions of security, gender equality, actuality and fantasy. At the beginning of the film, it states that over 60,000 children go missing in India every year. Juxtaposing this burning issue with another crisis – misogyny and objectification of women - Sen-Gupta’s thriller investigates a scandal that has perpetually degraded humankind.

Adil Hussain’s role of the police department’s social services inspector, running on the shady, violent backstreets of Mumbai underlines the ironic reflection of the modern fads that the city consumes every day. With his worn out outlook, Joshi eschews the cosmopolitan pretense of the city. For him, it’s eternally dark and all roads lead to doom (or Paradise in this case). The third sub plot of a 16-year-old boy, Babu (Chinmay Kambli) is a macabre closure of hope; a hope of ever finding a silver lining. 

Immaculate rendering of the characters’ sufferings confront the audience with a brutal reality that unnerves them with perplexing questions about what is fair and unfair, real and delusional, safe and unsafe. As seen in Paradise, 12-year-old Naina (Esha Amlani) and her guardian Komal (Gulnaaz Ansari), living at the back alley of the bar, are objects of voyeurism, trapped between sexual violence on one hand and physical brutality on the other. 

Sunrise originally premiered at the 2014 Busan International Film Festival and has yet to officially release in the Indian theatres. It has already won the Best Film award at the Imagine Amsterdam Film Festival, Special Mention at the Munich Film Festival, Best Film and Best Cinematography at the Durban film Festival, and so on. The hues of grim on the streets of Mumbai, the dispassionate ambience of a metropolis that pretends to be incandescent, the ironic fluorescence of Paradise, are all magnificently crafted by Director of Photography, Jean-Marc Ferriere.

Toggling with the theme of abuse of children and the collective failure of state machinery was another poignant and significant film last year, the Oscar winner Spotlight. Hope Sunrise too attains the acclaim and popularity that it rightly merits.