Making its premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival as part of the World Dramatic Competition is Qaushiq Mukherjee‘s (Q. for short) Brahman Naman, a coming of age sex comedy about a group of friends heading to the National Quiz Championships looking to win the competition and lose their virginities in the process.
This English-language Indian films looks completely outrageous and very funny, so I’ll definitely be adding it to my Sundance watch list, hoping that it will make its way to theaters sometime this year.
Here’s the synopsis from the Sundance site:
Being a teenage virgin in Bangalore, India during the 1980s was not for the faint-hearted. If you were a quiz nerd on top of that, forget about it. Naman, a young quizard who is determined not to sleep alone, leads his hopelessly nerdy high school friends on a trip to Calcutta with their eyes on a major college quiz prize. Young, smart, and full of heart, the trio are determined to win, but they’re just as determined to lose their virginity in the process.
Raising a finger to the Indian upper class, the camera is mightier than any sword for director Q. Revered internationally as one of India’s most vital independent filmmakers, this provocateur‘s newest cinematic cocktail takes the classic American teen comedy, sharpens it with bawdy British word play, and hurls it in the face of the establishment with a fresh Indian cast. This is a stylish, hilarious postcolonial rub that proves the pulse of underground Indian cinema has quickened.
