Sharmila Ganesan (THE TIMES OF INDIA; April 8, 2018)

No, Mumbai's Irani cafes do not remind Majid Majidi of home. The Iranian filmmaker—who has lost count of the number of times he has visited Mumbai in the last two decades—has eaten at several Parsi-run restaurants in South Mumbai, only to emerge a tad dissatisfied each time. “I haven’t found a single dish that is pure Iranian,” the 58-year-old says in Farsi, joining his index finger and thumb, even as his interpreter smiles before translating his food review. Authenticity-—as the world that discovered Majidi’s talent through his Oscar-nominated 1998 film ‘Children of Heaven’ knows—is precious to this director, whose habit of casting unknown faces lend his films their raw, unglamorous realism.

Majidi—whose soon-to-release first Indian film ‘Beyond The Clouds’ tells the story of an estranged brother-sister duo from Mumbai-—betrays an aura as unassuming as that of most of his protagonists. The auteur is in the city for the re-opening of Lower Parel’s Matterden Carnival cinemas, previously called Matterden Deepak Cinema, the iconic single-screen that has recently reinvented itself as a hub for world cinema.

Here, following the screening of 1998's ‘Children of Heaven’—the first Iranian film to have been nominated for an Oscar—Majidi will be presented with the Enlighten award, previously given to Mrinal Sen, Amitabh Bachchan and Shabana Azmi. "He is the undisputed star in terms of foreign filmmakers," says Pranav Ashar, founder of Matterden, who will be hosting a chat with Majidi. Be it ‘Baduk’—Majidi's first feature film that dwelled on the hardships of an impoverished sibling duo or—‘The Song of Sparrows’ in which an ostrich-rancher tries to replace his daughter's broken hearing aid before a crucial exam, his films dig deep into human relationships. "I like to explore the essence of humanity,” says the Satyajit Ray fan who grew up in a middle-class family in Tehran. “If I start commenting on social and political issues, my films will start looking like newspapers," he says. All the same, Majidi —who is weary of the western media's tendency to exaggerate stories of the artists’ struggle in Iran—believes cinema can shatter stereotypes about Islam in an increasingly exclusivist world.

What drew Majidi, who as a teen acted in amateur theater groups and even studied art at the Institute of Dramatic Art in Tehran, to the “vast and amazing” medium of cinema was the urge to translate his many experiences during Iran's Islamic Revolution of 1978-79. Majidi writes the characters himself and later seeks them out from the crowd, "like they were people who had gone missing". He spent four months auditioning over 10,000 kids to finally find the faces that play the thin-voiced sibling duo in ‘Children of Heaven’.

Predictably, when probed for his impression of Bollywood, he looks away: “Don’t ask me such tough questions." Majidi feels that Indian films, despite good directors and talent, are still confined by commercial trappings. In fact, when he first arrived in Mumbai almost 20 years ago, he was struck by how different India looked from the picture that Indian films painted. South Mumbai’s heritage buildings and the intimate coexistence of the poor alongside the rich were stereotype-shattering visuals for the Iranian even as friends back home enquired about Indians: "Were they all dancing?"

Majidi fears the Indian film industry might hit a dead end if it continues on its escapist path. “India is no less than the US from a technical point of view," he says. "It has a lot of potential but it hasn’t been using this for some reason.”