Cinema surveillance images are loading at the bottom of the page

Split wide open

Threat advisory: High - High risk of entertaining activities

Movie propaganda

Kut Price (Rahul Bose), aka KP, tries to get ahead in the water business by selling tank water to the poor and Evian to the rich. Didi, his 10-year-old adopted sister, sells flowers on the streets and waits for a miracle to happen. Leela (Ayesha Dharker), a student, discovers the unspeakable secrets of her wealthy father. And Nandita, an expatriate recently arrived from London, hosts a hugely popular reality-TV show on which people confess the secrets of their sex lives. Welcome to Bombay 2000, a city of extremes where globalisation is the buzzword.

Also starring Laila Raouss as Nan and Shivaji Satham as Shiv. Music by Nitin Sawhey, directed by Dev Benegal

Part of the Goat Island Film Festival. Screens with the Australian short film Flux (9 minutes) and pre-film entertainment provided by the Peter Shaeffer ensemble - didge, sitar and tabla mix traditional Australian sounds with Indian in a compelling fusion.

Intelligence analyst

Special Agent Matti

Theatrical report

Cutting edge drama from India.

The Filmi Fundas Manifesto does for Indian cinema what the Dogme 95 manifesto does for European cinema: drives it away from crass, shallow imitations of Hollywood and forces filmmakers to look at what is really going on around them. No flashy costumes, no special effects, no wild and wacky carrying on. Just reality and a camera (in as much as actors pretending to be characters is reality).

The story is the endlessly fascinating peek into other people's lives. A little gossip goes a long way and Split wide open is chockablock with other people's dirty laundry. It's a stickybeak's paradise. Not only does the TV show use the most salacious stories but KP's life is a story of crime, sex, special deals, gang lords and adventure. He's the romantic's romantic and sexy in a dark, desperate and passionate kind of way. Nandita is the ultimate ex-pat: dissatisfied with where she's been, dissatisfied with where she is and dissatisfied with where she's going. Caught up in straight-laced, middle-class views she can do nothing but yearn for the wild, uncensored life that is KP's.

Everything about Split wide open retains the uniquely indie quality of rawness and rough edges, but doesn't fall into the trap of putting them onto a pedestal through poor technique. You can watch it without having to stop and figure out if the fuzziness of the image is because it's art or because it's out of focus. I am all for pushing the boundaries of cinema but not at the expense of accessibility; a film is not much good if no-one can watch it. The audience may be, ignorant, uneducated philistines but that's no excuse for making a film that's impenetrable. Like its more élite cousin, the theatre, cinema is nothing without its audience - the filmmaker can mess with their minds as much as a filmmaker can... but if they don't know they're being messed with, are they being messed with at all?

Security censorship classification

R 18+

Surveillance time

107 minutes (1:47 hours)

Not for public release in Australia before date

Film: 24 November 2000
Film: 26 November 2000
Film: 30 November 2000