A sweeping year-end chronicle of cinema, culture, memory, rebellion, and conscience—where filmmakers, critics, and artists came together through The Daily Eye to look deeply, question fiercely, and remember what truly matters.

The Daily Eye’s definitive 2025 year-end essay brings together landmark writing by Khalid Mohamed, Saibal Chatterjee, Monojit Lahiri, Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri, Utpal Datta, Vandana Kumar, Sharad Raj, Anup Singh, Devdutt Trivedi, Amborish Roychoudhury and Vinta Nanda, spanning Indian and global cinema, auteurs, independent films, politics, memory, gender, justice, and cultural survival.

If 2025 reaffirmed anything at The Daily Eye, it was this: cinema is not merely entertainment—it is a way of seeing, remembering, questioning, and surviving. Across the year, the platform emerged as a living archive of ideas and emotions, shaped by writers who refused comfort, silence, or easy answers.

Freedom, Technology, and Legacy

Questions of power and censorship surfaced in Khalid Mohamed’s retrospective on Louis Malle’s Phantom India. By revisiting the documentary’s ban and resurrection, Mohamed connected historical suppression with present-day anxieties around dissent and representation.

Mohamed’s engagement with the present continued in his conversation with AI artist Prateek Arora, where he resisted both alarmism and blind enthusiasm. The piece reaffirmed creativity as a moral, human act in an age of automation.

Craft and patience returned in Mohamed’s meditative interview with master photographer Rafique Sayed, whose devotion to black-and-white photography stood against digital excess and AI interference. 

Legacy found intimate expression in Mohamed’s dialogue with Ramu Aravindan, son of Malayalam auteur G. Aravindan, as restored prints of Thampu and Kummatty travelled the world. Preservation here was framed as stewardship, not nostalgia.

That sense of continuity deepened in Mohamed’s expansive conversation with Sai Paranjpye—witty, candid, and deeply moving. Still dreaming, still grieving unwritten films, Paranjpye embodied resilience as an artistic ethic.

The section resonated with Mohamed’s reflective essay on discovering cinematic “jewels” on YouTube—an ode to curiosity as resistance.

Conscience and Rebellion: Cinema That Refused Silence

The writing turned insistently toward memory and moral courage. Khalid Mohamed’s elegy to Shaji N. Karun, The Gentle Genius, mourned not just a filmmaker but an ethos—of humility, restraint, and poetic cinema.

Continuity was celebrated in Mallika Bhaumik’s luminous essay on Satyajit Ray, written through the lens of childhood memory. By foregrounding Feluda, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, illustrations, and music, Bhaumik reaffirmed Ray as an intimate, formative presence.

Rupture arrived through Monojit Lahiri, who emerged as a persistent chronicler of cultural loss. In Goutam Ghosh’s Bold Prayer, Lahiri examined Parikrama as cinema of conscience, where development, ecology, and displacement collide without rhetoric.

Lahiri’s remembrance of Rituparno Ghosh celebrated a filmmaker who expanded Indian cinema’s emotional and gendered vocabulary. His absence, Lahiri argued, remains acutely felt.

That absence sharpened into critique in When Two Worlds Collide, where Lahiri mapped OTT’s insurgent realism—actors over stars, women over stereotypes. In Feted Abroad, Forgotten at Home, he indicted a system that celebrates Indian cinema abroad while neglecting it domestically. Yet hope persisted. Lahiri’s celebration of Ei Raat Tomar Amar, starring Aparna Sen and Anjan Dutt, framed adult cinema as “fine dining for the soul.”

His twin essays on Satyajit Ray’s heroes and Ritwik Ghatak’s rebellion offered a masterclass in contrast—humanist introspection versus volcanic dissent. The section closed tenderly with Basanti Tailors, written with warmth and empathy, celebrating quiet resistance through kindness.

Turning Inward: Body, Desire, Discomfort

This inward turn was anchored by Saibal Chatterjee, whose criticism insisted on slowness and moral attention. In Alaav – Hearth and Home, Chatterjee explored ageing through repetition and care, arguing that cinema’s radical act may simply be to slow down.

His reading of Secret of a Mountain Serpent situated female desire within folklore and repression, refusing sensationalism. Gender and justice re-emerged in his review of Haifaa Al Mansour’s Unidentified, where silence itself became political. Chatterjee addressed rural precarity in Vimukt (In Search of the Sky) and youthful rebellion in Bad Girl by Varsha Bharath, celebrating its refusal to shame female desire.

Ethics entered through Satyabrata Ghosh’s essay on Satyakam, where music functioned as moral inquiry.

The most challenging provocations came from Sharad Raj, whose essays on incest, mythology, and cinema reframed taboo as metaphor for power and repression. His companion piece on Ritwik Ghatak, drawing from Jung, Marx, and Brecht, reaffirmed cinema’s capacity to metabolise historical trauma. Generational discomfort surfaced in Raj’s essay on Les Mistons, arguing for contextual engagement over cancellation.

This inward register was complemented by Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri’s essay on Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, tracing a career shaped by ambiguity, loss, and moral inquiry.

Facing the World: Justice, Memory, Survival

Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri’s review of Shotyi Bole Shotyi Kichhu Nei celebrated Srijit Mukherji’s bold reimagining of 12 Angry Men, exposing prejudice as mobile and gendered.

Utpal Datta’s review of Celestina and Lawrence portrayed post-demonetisation India through tribal migrants navigating urban indifference. Datta continued this engagement in his conversation with Amardeep Gogoi on Collage, insisting that remembrance itself is political.

Memory softened in Vandana Kumar’s nostalgic return to Les Mistons, where cinema became a shared emotional archive. Urgency followed in Vinta Nanda’s essay on Origin and I Am A Noise, connecting caste, race, trauma, and emotional inheritance. That fusion of memory and history deepened in her review of The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case, produced by Applause Entertainment and directed by Nagesh Kukunoor, where restraint honoured national grief.

Hope arrived through Nanda’s intimate portrait of tabla prodigy Keshava Kaarthikeyan, a story of lineage, discipline, and joy. The closing resonance came through Vandana Kumar’s devastating revisit of Keren Yedaya’s Or, a film offering no escape—only witness.

Relearning How to See

In an insightful interview by Amoborish Roychoudhury, French filmmaker Cedric Dupire spoke about The Real Superstar, a radical cinematic reimagining of Amitabh Bachchan. Roychoudhury’s piece dismantled star mythology to reveal Bachchan as cinematic memory—composed of gestures, silences, and fragments—setting the tone for a body of work that privileged depth over dazzle.

Roychoudhury continued this engagement with history in his essay on Do Bigha Zamin, written as Bimal Roy’s restored classic travelled to Venice. By tracing its lineage from Tagore’s Dui Bigha Jomi to Italian neorealism, he framed the film not as nostalgia but as ethical cinema whose themes of displacement and dignity remain painfully relevant.

Emotion and restraint came into focus in Anup Singh’s sensitive reading of Shoojit Sircar’s I Want To Talk. Singh argued that emotional truth lies not in explanation but in silence and ellipsis—a belief that echoed throughout The Daily Eye’s editorial philosophy.

Philosophical intensity followed through Devdutt Trivedi’s rigorous critique of David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. Drawing on Antonioni, Deleuze, and Indian aesthetic theory, Trivedi questioned whether symbolic excess can substitute lived human experience—challenging cinephiles to rethink contemporary global cinema.

These converging movements—rediscovery, conscience, interiority, and confrontation—form a single pulse. Together, they reveal The Daily Eye’s commitment to plurality: many voices, many ways of seeing, many truths held together without dilution.

This was a year when The Daily Eye chose to look—and refused to look away.  Revisit the entire set of articles here: Alternative Entertainment by The Daily Eye 2025