The 25th anniversary screening of The Warrior will be followed by a Q&A with director Asif Kapadia, hosted by Ashvin Devasundaram.
Before Senna and the Oscar-winning Amy, British filmmaker Asif Kapadia announced his arrival with a massive splash 25 years ago with the BAFTA winning debut The Warrior. Described as a ‘boldly spacious and terrifically confident piece of filmmaking,’ the film stars Hindi cinema’s international icon Irrfan Khan (The Lunchbox, The Life of Pi) as the ruthless warrior Lafcadia who undergoes a profound spiritual transformation that compels him to abandon his life of savagery in arid Rajasthan and return to his native village in the Himalayas. Drawing both from the Western and the Japanese samurai fables and iconography, The Warrior earned critical comparisons with the likes of Sergio Leone and Kurosawa.
Roman Osin’s awe-inspiring cinematography combined with Irrfan Khan’s hauntingly indelible performance are marvellous sights to behold on the big screen as we revisit this dazzling classic on its 25th anniversary, albeit in the sombre recognition of the tragic and irreplaceable loss of Irrfan Khan who will forever be missed by cinephiles worldwide.
Dr Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram is Reader in Global Cinemas at Queen Mary University of London. He is author of India's New Independent Cinema: Rise of the Hybrid (Routledge, 2016), Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood: The New Independent Cinema Revolution (Routledge, 2018) and Indian Indies: A Guide to New Independent Indian Cinema (with a foreword by Shabana Azmi) (Routledge, 2022) - the world's first books on new Indian Indie films. Ashvin has directed Movies, Memories, Magic (2018). He is Principal Investigator on the ongoing AHRC-funded research project ‘Connecting Creative Industries and Cultural Heritage: India-UK Film Festival Federation, Youth Curation and Community Co-Creation’ (2024-27).
Curated by Anupma Shanker:
Anupma Shanker is a British-Indian film curator and archives researcher with a deep and evolving interest in marginalised and minority screen narratives from, of and about the past. Her curatorial practice is focused on bringing to light films and filmmakers that remain overlooked, inaccessible and undiscovered but can offer valuable insight, wisdom and guidance in contextualizing the difficult but urgent discourses about the myths and realities of shared/contested histories, heritage, identities and memories. Website