Monsoon Wedding

Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding is one of those rare films that manages to be simultaneously a joyous celebration and a gutting indictment. The surface is pure pleasure: a chaotic Delhi wedding, Naseeruddin Shah as the weary patriarch, Shefali Shah as a woman carrying a secret, the monsoon rain turning everything green and golden. But beneath the surface, the film is doing something far more subversive.

When Aditi (Vasundhara Das), the bride, discovers that a beloved family member — the wealthy, charming uncle who paid for her education — has been molesting her cousin Ria (Shefali Shah in a career-making performance) since she was a child, the wedding becomes a reckoning. The confrontation scene, in which Ria finally names the abuse publicly, is one of the most powerful sequences in Indian cinema — made more powerful by the fact that it takes place in the middle of a wedding, in front of everyone, because that is where abuse happens: in plain sight.

Nair won the Golden Lion at Venice. The film grossed over $30 million worldwide on a $1.2 million budget. It launched a thousand imitations of the "big fat Indian wedding" genre, none of which understood the original's moral seriousness.