Court

Chaitanya Tamhane was 27 when he made Court, his debut feature, which won the Best Film prize in the Orizzonti section at Venice and became India's official submission to the Academy Awards. The film is a legal drama in structure but a sociological portrait in effect — a slow, forensic examination of how the Indian judicial system processes (or fails to process) the lives of the poor.

Narayan Kamble (Vira Sathidar), a Dalit folk singer, is arrested under an obscure law for allegedly inciting a sewer worker to commit suicide with his protest songs. The film follows the case through three perspectives: Kamble's defense lawyer (a young, idealistic woman), the public prosecutor (a weary bureaucrat), and the judge (a middle-class woman who commutes two hours to court every day and is as trapped by the system as anyone).

Tamhane never raises his voice. The film's power comes from its accumulation of detail: the dust in the courtroom, the translators who don't bother to translate, the fact that the trial takes months and resolves nothing. At one point, the judge admits she forgot to sign the arrest warrant. "It happens," the prosecutor shrugs. It does.