In the first film she ever wrote, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, Arundhati Roy wears a red sari with a hat. I ask if the colour is political, and she responds with a laugh: “Well, yes, it’s red. It’s a lot of things.

You can read whatever you want into it. I just love that red. The [book jacket of] Mother Mary Comes to Me is that red, too.

” The 1989 film was perceived to be lost, barring a bad print on YouTube. But now the whimsical cult campus comedy is restored, and set for a world premiere. Roy shares, however, that she hasn’t been able to rejoice because her beloved dog, Maati K.

Lal, passed away last week. Annie. will have its world premiere at Berlinale Classics in the 76th Berlin International Film Festival this month, 37 years after it was telecast (just once) on Doordarshan.

Both Roy and the film’s director Pradip Krishen sound bemused at the idea of a global stage for a small project. “From today’s vantage point, it’s quite a wacky story,” Roy remarks. The news is well-timed though, following on the heels of the Booker Prize-winning author’s memoir, Mother Mary.

, which flew off the shelves the minute it landed five months ago. “It’s pure coincidence,” Roy attests.

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur of Film Heritage Foundation, which has restored the 16mm film in 4K resolution, adds, “We are also working on Pakeezah, Amma Ariyan, Samskara, and Imagi Ningthem. Annie… is the only one that was ready to be sent.

This is the first time I have entered a film in Berlin [festival]. ” The film was made for ₹12 lakh; Roy worked on all three of Krishen’s films: Massey Sahib (1985), Annie…, and Electric Moon (1992).

She also donned three roles for Annie…: screenplay writer, actor, and art director-cum-production designer. “We were regarded by everyone as lunatic fringe. That’s a badge we wore quite proudly.

Even within the new wave cinema or parallel cinema, we were the outliers,” says Krishen, the filmmaker-turned- environmentalist. Roy and Krishen were married and remain great friends. Rediscovery and restoration In 2024, Delhi-based Krishen was moving out of the house he had lived in for 50 years.

In his basement, he found six large steel trunks full of old film materials. He was going to ship them off to a kabaadi (scrap dealer) until a friend connected him with Dungarpur. The film’s 16mm original camera negative and sound negative were at the National Film Archive of India, Pune, and the rest — a blown-up 35mm release print, digital audiotapes, shooting script, and dialogue script — travelled from Delhi to Mumbai.

The negatives had perforation, emulsion damage, fading, broken splices, tears, scratches, shrinkage, mould and halos. After hours of manual work, digital restoration and colour grading, the scans were sent to L’Immagine Ritrovata lab in Bologna for further restoration. “There was colour fading in several sections; it was also a shaky film,” says Dungarpur, who had first seen the film in the early ’90s as a Film Television Institute of India student.

“Sound was another challenge. It had poor quality mono [single track], with significant electrical noise, distortion, gaps and many drops. ” But, he adds, “when you’re restoring a Taj Mahal, you don’t make the marble better than the ones Shah Jahan had put.

You try and match the beauty”. The restoration took 18 months, and Krishen was called in for the subtitles because even though it was in English, it was idiosyncratic of the ’70s student milieu [Annie… was set in 1974].

Roy approves of the outcome. “It hasn’t been restored into some glossy tech fantasy. It’s just as sort of grainy and scrappy as it’s meant to be.

And that’s beautiful,” she says. Making of an oddball title Arjun Raina, who played the titular role of a misguided visionary courting trouble, shares a vivid memory.

“When I [his character Annie, short for Anand Grover] got slapped by actor Yuvraj Singh in the police station, the real station house officer scolded Singh, saying ‘Tujhe gaal laal karna nahin aata, main karke dikhata hoon [you can’t even slap; let me show you]. Luckily, it did not require another take,” says Raina, now a Melbourne-based Kathakali dancer, playwright, and an acting voice and speech coach, adding, “Annie is still giving it those ones in life. ” ‘Giving it those ones’ often implies a habitual or eccentric routine.

“It was such a university thing back then. It seemed like the obvious title,” Roy says, as Krishen adds, “I wanted people from Delhi University at the time to be able to recognise the title as being theirs.

The original title was ‘Chapter Five’, because the film was about the fifth-year students at School of Planning and Architecture [SPA]. But it sounded too mundane. ” Krishen remembers how while shooting on Delhi’s streets, some passers-by asked what the film’s name was.

Knowing the full title would draw puzzled looks, the cameraman said: “Those Ones. ” Ever since then, it came to be known as Do Jawan, much to the makers’ amusement.

Its very first screening was at the Max Mueller Bhavan Delhi to a packed hall of young architecture students. “They were excited to watch this version of themselves on screen,” says Krishen.

The opposite of Bollywood Roy admits that she used to get offended because people thought it was a documentary. “Because, I suppose, it moves so easily, is so real,” she says.

“We were looking for people who were not beautiful or good-looking, but slightly screwed-up. looking for the opposite of Bollywood.

It was even fringe to parallel cinema. The lightness comes from us not having any ambitions.

” Some of the lines in Annie… stay with you through life. Goa-based production designer Aradhana Seth (Fire, Earth, Don), who was one of the assistant directors on the film, says each time she sees new construction with flawed orientation (for instance, beach cottages that don’t face the sea), she’s reminded of the film and what Yamdoot (principal Y. D.

Billimoria, essayed by Roshan Seth) says to Annie when he presents his architecture project: “But my dear donkey, have you forgotten all about orientation?” Yamdoot’s character, Roy says, “was based on our principal Cyrus Jhabvala [husband of Booker Prize and Oscar-winning novelist-screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala]. People were really terrified of him.

Except for me. I had no home, I had no ambition, nothing to fear.

He used to like me for that. And call me ‘animal’ for some reason.

In the film, his character calls Annie animal. Jhabvala saw the film and loved it”.

In which SRK gets a cameo Unlike parallel cinema, which zoomed into the lives of, say, a truck driver or farmer, films like Annie… showed the urban youth. “It was similar to the way we were living [messy hostels, student bonhomie], not a reality far removed from us but one we lived.

It was made in our vocabulary,” says Aradhana. “I don’t remember another film like this.

” Fresh out of Jamia Millia Islamia, the film was her first paid gig — as it was for the many aspiring actors in it, most of whom were coming from Barry John’s TAG (Theatre Action Group). Shah Rukh Khan bagged a forgettable cameo, as the lead (the late Rituraj Singh) was already cast — and SRK “didn’t come up to the mark, he didn’t stand out as somebody who was a good actor”, admits the director. Actress Divya Seth (Jab We Met, Sir, Article 370), who was doing double shifts, parallelly working on a Doordarshan serial with filmmaker Lekh Tandon, recalls, “It was quite a magical time.

We were a bunch of friends; the jokes became in-house. ” The way Cecil Qadir, a teacher looking at a student’s project, enunciates his displeasure, “with twinkling, beady eyes, ‘But this is ho-ree-bal!’; even today we say it like that when something is awful”, Divya says with a laugh.

Lingua franca of freedom In 1987, Roy and Krishen’s big project, the historical period piece Bargad, which they had been working on for years, “had gone down the tubes”, says Roy. Then they’d heard that Doordarshan was funding small films. “I wanted to write about what I knew, not about things that were unfamiliar or research based,” she adds.

“Like I said in the book [Mother Mary…], for me, the school of architecture was a radical liberation from a pretty troubled space that I came from. It represented radical freedom to me and I wanted to write about that — and the freedom involved a lack of ambition, having no money.

” Roy remembers how she and a friend carried a college mate’s favourite moped in the lift up to the fifth floor and parked it at his desk. “It was almost ridiculous to be wealthy, have all that stuff and to show off.

The more ragged we were, the more respected. That’s why I keep saying, Annie… is a stance,” Roy says.

“Obviously, I was not writing about the most deprived sections of society, but it was still not high privilege. There was such a diversity of students, a diversity of kinds of English.

We were all from places [the Northeast, Odisha, Bengal, Kerala] where the only language we had in common was English. ” Krishen and Roy worked hard to give it the kind of language and subculture they had both grown up in, 10 years apart, in Delhi University.

“We spoke a very specific kind of English that was also very funny and beautiful,” Roy says. “For me, it was so important to celebrate it, because most people in those days would make fun of Indian English. ” It’s an idea that’s relevant today too, when Gen Z lingo is getting a lot of attention.

“Among the younger demographics, language games are always more agile and nimble. Every generation has its own slant and purchase on English, like how we instrumentalise, appropriate and wield our own versions of it,” says Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Shaunak Sen (All that Breathes), who has tasted varying registers of English assimilation at Delhi University, Jamia Millia Islamia and Jawaharlal Nehru University. Sen adds that from today’s vantage point, Annie… will feel like an ephemeral, transient moment.

“But that’s the job of good pieces of cinema — they’re able to pin down things authentically, articulate the linguistic zeitgeist, and eschew any kind of homogenisation, let alone linguistics. ” According to filmmaker Kanu Behl (Titli, Agra), the only difference back then was that “instead of having a universal language that almost becomes a new dictionary [which is true for the generation now], we were making our own codas in our own regional languages”. Days of ‘jugaad’ “It was a lot of jugaad, everybody was on it,” adds Aradhana, who’d drive Krishen and Roy home in a Maruti with two chickens Sadhana and Sangeeta [that feature in the film] atop, whose parents’ house became Yamdoot’s in the film, and whose friend’s and brother’s clothes contributed to the cast.

Roy remembers how show of privilege was frowned upon. At SPA, she and a friend carried a college mate’s favourite moped up the lift to the fifth floor and parked it at his desk.

“It was almost ridiculous to be wealthy, have all that stuff and to show off, the more ragged we were, the more respected. That’s why I keep saying, Annie… is a stance,” Roy opines.

Cinema that resists Roy writes in her memoir, “Nobody could have been more shocked than Pradip and me when Annie… won two National Awards, one for Best Screenplay and the other, my favourite award of all time, ‘Best Film in Languages Other Than Those Specified in Schedule VIII of the Indian Constitution’. A very Annie award.

” She calls the awards a “sweet revenge”. Roy adds, “If I were to tell the truth, when I won that Best Screenplay award for Annie, it was an important moment, not because of the award as such, but because I was a child next to Pradip.

And people [men, mostly] were constantly taking me for his assistant, asking me to write but not demand credit. For a much younger woman to come out from under his shadows, it’s not a small thing. I swam against the current.

Now I punch high above my weight. It’s heads of state, not mothers and lovers. ” In 2015, after Mohammed Akhlaq, 52, was lynched by a mob in Uttar Pradesh, Roy and Krishen returned their National Awards.

Can an unfiltered film like Annie… be made today? “I don’t think anything is impossible. But I think everything has become so contentious, the air is so charged, and so it’s not easy at all to make space for this kind of gentle, defeated young people, not taking themselves seriously, not well dressed, the opposite of what happens today,” Roy says, “Today, everything is negotiated with a hammer.

There was an easiness then, which is now a rare thing. It’s very hard to maintain that lightness of touch.

But I feel, it is incumbent on us as writers and filmmakers to claim it. We can’t just keep blaming the system. We also have to do our work and make the space.

” Film scholar-historian Amrit Gangar adds that in our culturally vibrant country, “there are always voices of ‘resistance’ — open or hidden, eloquent or quiet. That niche has to be created by an imaginative mind”. It would gladden Krishen’s heart, who rues that none of his films has been commercially released in Indian cinemas, to know that Annie… will release in theatres in March (13-15), as Dungarpur lets on.

Limited channels of release In the ’70s and ’80s, the country was at the forefront of the indie/parallel cinema renaissance — whether through the NFDC (National Film Development Corporation), which produced Krishen’s Massey Sahib, or Doordarshan. “That space has shrunk now; the overall ecosystem is broken,” says filmmaker Kanu Behl (Titli, Agra). Gangar notes that when multiplexes started in India in 1997, “independent filmmakers thought their films would get theatrically released.

It never happened, save in rare cases [Madhusree Dutta’s 7 Islands and a Metro (2006), Paresh Kamdar’s Khargos (2009), Rajat Kapoor’s Ankhon Dekhi (2013)]. ” According to Sen, “The initial promise and euphoria around streamers is dead in India.

Now, with lack of infrastructure, international co-productions are becoming important because the indie circuit is still figuring out how to fund smaller films. ” And what film societies did for smaller yet genre-defining films like Kumar Shahani’s Maya Darpan (1972), channels such as Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp are doing today. Vinay Shukla’s documentary While We Watched (on journalist Ravish Kumar, formerly with NDTV) was widely circulated via these messaging apps.

Indians at Berlinale 2026 Jury: Shivendra Singh Dungarpur (international jury; Competition); Shaunak Sen (documentary award jury); Saagar Gupta (Teddy Award [LGBTQIA+ films] jury) Classics: In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones Forum: R. Gowtham’s Members of a Problematic Family, Madhushree Dutta’s Flying Tigers Forum Expanded: Utkarsh’s A Circle as the Center of the Whole Generation Kplus: Rima Das’s Not a Hero, Amay Mehrishi’s Abracadabra Berlinale Talents: Tanushree Das, Subarna Dash, Anadi Athaley, Kislay, Thanikachalam S.

A. , Devraj Bhoumik, Vedant Srinivas Berlinale Co-Production Market: Nihaarika Negi’s Feral South Asia programming delegate: Anu Rangachar tanushree.

ghosh@thehindu. co. in.