Ritesh Batra Selected Among World’s 10 Most Promising Directors

If his Hindi debut The Lunchbox opened up yummy possibilities out West Ritesh Batra’s English-language debut is creating ripples in the West even before its official release.

Batra’s film The Sense Of An Ending based on Julian Barnes’ novel has been selected  by Variety magazines among the 10 films and directors to watch out for in 2016. Clubbing Batra for this singular honour  with  some of the best works of the year—no Indian director has been thus honoured in recent times—Variety places Batraand his film alongside Julia Ducourno’s shocking  horror film Raw and theatre’s veteran director William Oldroyd’s screen adaptation of Lady Macbeth.

Ritesh Batra’s The Sense Of An Ending will open the 28^th Palm Springs International Film Festival on January 2, 2017.He is understandably pleased but habitually calm about the honour. “One doesn’t know what the outcome would be when one sets off too make  a film.The Sense Of An Ending was completed in June. Shooting with actors like Jim Broadbent and Charlotte Rampling was very enriching.”

Batra   got to work with the legendary litterateur Julian Barnes.

Says Ritesh, “Barnes was on the project helping us all through.It is an interesting challenge to adapt the novel. We couldn’t just take the book and put it on screen. We had to search for the centre of the novel and place it in the film.And since I was involved with the writing I  didn’t feel the brunt of the cultural shift from Mumbai in The Lunchbox to England in The Sense Of An Ending.”

Batra says  the film moves quite a way away from the novel. “If you’ve read the novel it’s actually very slight in length. There were lots of unspoken feelings and emotions between the lines which we had to dig out . We had to amplify the emotions. It was an amazing experience to work on the development of the script with Julian Barnes.”