Exclusive | In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, Again: Arundhati Roy and Pradip Krishen on Taking Their Film to Berlinale 2026

The opening scenes of In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones show a group of architecture students killing time between classes, batting a table-tennis ball, sharpening their wit, half-listening to one another. Instructions are shouted. Complaints are aired. English and Hindi slide into each other without friction. The mood is restless, intimate, casual. Nothing feels very important, which is precisely the point.

“It was set in the School of Architecture a few years before my time, so even then it wasn’t exactly contemporary,” Arundhati Roy tells The Hollywood Reporter India. “But when I think back to it now, I feel there was a kind of freedom there. A lack of ambition combined with a deep concern, in a very young and unfocused way, about what was going on in this country. And honestly, a kind of radical freedom that just does not exist today for young people.” 

Directed and produced by Pradip Krishen and written by Roy in the late 1980s, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones first aired on Doordarshan in 1989, quietly and late at night, with little publicity and conspicuous censorship. Its afterlife unfolded largely outside official channels. Architecture schools kept it circulating. Film students passed it on. Dialogue was half-remembered, then misremembered, then quoted again.

“Pradip and I were actually the first people to pirate our own film,” Roy says, laughing. “We gave it to a bookshop that had this little video library. KD Singh, who ran the shop, would always greet me with lines from the film.” 

37 years later, Annie is returning to public view in a newly restored version, undertaken by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur and the Film Heritage Foundation, with a screening scheduled at the Berlinale on February 16. The restoration resists the impulse to modernise the film’s appearance. The grain is retained. The roughness remains visible. The effort, as Krishen and the restoration team say, was not to over-correct. 

“I find it very beautiful that it hasn’t been restored into some glossy technical thing,” Roy says. “You can still see the grain. You can still see how small the budget was, how things were patched together. And I think that’s lovely. The budget was exactly what those characters deserved. There was an integrity to it.” 

The film follows Anand “Annie” Grover through his final year at an architecture college in Delhi, closely modelled on the School of Planning and Architecture. The people around Annie are bright, unfocused, occasionally brilliant and often paralysed by indecision. They talk endlessly, argue passionately and fail spectacularly. The institution demands conformity. The students cannot be asked to conform. They go around “giving it those ones”.  

“‘Giving it those ones’ meant somebody doing their usual thing,” says Krishen. “Our first title was actually Chapter Five, because the characters are in their fifth year of architecture school. But we wanted a title recognisable to that generation in Delhi. ‘Giving it those ones’ became a little flag saying: this is about you. There’s a funny story. We shortened it to Those Ones because people couldn’t get the full title. Then, while shooting, we heard people on the street saying ‘Do Jawans’. So we happily accepted that as an unofficial title too,” he says laughing. 

Despite its politics, Annie wasn’t an angry film. Its dissent was embedded in tone rather than declaration. The resistance was in how people lived. 

“In my non-fiction essays, when I confront something politically, there is anger, and that’s important,” Roy says. “But in fiction and memoir, I refuse to give up nuance. I refuse to give up tenderness. My life and work are full of vanquished, failed, tender people. I celebrate them all the time.” 

Krishen places that tenderness in a generational context. “The counterculture I lived through, and Arundhati lived through it ten years later, was really the late ’60s and early ’70s for me,” he says. “That moment when students were rebelling against the system didn’t carry so much anger as hope and celebration. People were celebrating a different way of looking at the world. Anger wasn’t something Arundhati reached for when she was writing the script. It was really about people who found joy in being themselves and saying we don’t want to conform.” 

That understanding was rooted in Roy’s own experience. In Mother Mary Comes to Me, her memoir of childhood and early adulthood, she describes entering the School of Architecture as a form of escape. After years shaped by instability and fear, the campus felt like sanctuary. 

“For me, the School of Architecture was an escape from what was, frankly, a horror story,” Roy says. “I’ve written about how I entered the gates and wanted to kiss the filthy driveway, as though I’d reached the promised land. That place gave me radical freedom. Even today, the study of architecture in that way informs everything I write and design.” 

Language became the film’s most radical gesture. Characters spoke as students in Delhi actually spoke, slipping between Hindi and English, inventing slang, bending grammar for pleasure rather than effect. One word, hazar, meaning a thousand, mutated into hajjar, then ricocheted back into English as “thou-jand”, shorthand for abundance or enthusiasm. To hear it was to recognise yourself. 

“We met Bhaskar Ghose, who was the Director General of Doordarshan at the time, very unusual and much more open than most people heading Doordarshan,” Krishen recalls. “He wanted to showcase new films. Somewhere in that conversation, we said: how would you like a film where people speak like they actually speak, not dialogue-baazi? A mix of English, Hindi, maybe Punjabi if you’re in Delhi.” 

Ghose asked to see a script. Roy mined her memories of being a student at SPA. “We worked very carefully on the language,” Krishen says. “It was deliberate, to look at a subculture faithfully.” 

The first screening, at Max Mueller Bhavan, was electric. “A huge group of architecture students started screaming within minutes: ‘Oh my God, this is us.’ That recognition, that was special.”

The film’s institutional journey proved far shakier. Before Annie, Krishen and Roy had been developing Bargad (The Banyan Tree), a 26-part historical television serial set in Allahabad. After years of work, the project collapsed. In its aftermath, Ghose invited Krishen to pitch something smaller and promised to personally clear it for broadcast. 

That promise dissolved abruptly. While Ghose was in the process of viewing Annie, he was removed from his post. Contrary to popular lore, his dismissal was not because of the film but followed his decision to give airtime to an opposition politician, angering the Rajiv Gandhi government. 

The film entered bureaucratic limbo. It eventually landed on the desk of an acting Director General. Phone calls followed. Deliberations dragged on. Krishen and Roy overheard officials conferring. 

“They were literally asking each other, ‘Balls rakh sakte hai kya?’” Krishen recalls. “Then someone said, ‘Bohot balls bolte hai.’” 

When Annie finally aired, it did so late at night, without announcement, with words bleeped mid-sentence. The censorship was clumsy, sometimes absurd. Yet people watched. 

“It aired very late at night, with no publicity,” says Krishen. “I’m always astonished when people tell me they caught it back then.” 

Over the years, the film survived in degraded copies with muddy sound and patchy print. Recognition moved laterally, not vertically. Among the faces drifting through the film was a young Shah Rukh Khan, in his first screen appearance. 

“We did an acting workshop that lasted a few weeks,” Krishen says. “That was used for auditioning. Shah Rukh was by no means a star then. We cast people according to how they performed. He was given a small role because that’s what we thought he deserved at the time.” 

He laughs at hindsight. “Someone later asked me why I didn’t give Shah Rukh a bigger role. I said, maybe I’m the only person who couldn’t spot his propensity to become a big star. But we weren’t looking for star quality. This film was about unsure, vulnerable characters, not heroes.” 

The restoration began almost accidentally. While preparing to move house, Krishen discovered six steel trunks in his basement filled with scripts, budgets and correspondence.  “I was going to give it all to a kabaadi,” he says. “A friend, Ratnesh Mathur, stopped me and contacted Shivendra. He came the next day and took everything. Later he asked about restoring Annie.” 

“The fact that the film was pretty much picked up from a dustbin and restored, and then offered to Berlin, is really quite magical,” Krishen says. 

The restoration proved technically difficult. The negative at the National Film Archive of India was in poor condition. The sound was worse. Krishen had insisted on direct sound recording at a time when few Indian productions attempted it, and ambient noise had bled into every track. 

“When I saw the material on the Steenbeck, I could see how damaged it was,” says Dungarpur. “The sprockets had broken. It’s like a vintage car you love. You find it lying there, and you want to bring it back to life.” 

What struck him most was the film’s contemporaneity. “People now know Arundhati Roy as a Booker Prize winner, internationally huge. And this is the film she crafted. Her early writing. The way Pradip and she came together to make this, it needed to be seen.” 

The process took over a year. Damage was addressed selectively. Sound was cleaned without being sterilised. “It was shot on 16mm,” Dungarpur says. “16 is not 35. It has grain. Honesty in restoration is crucial. In India, we often overdo it, make films too clean. That’s why many restorations don’t travel. Berlin responded to the truthfulness of it, and to the film itself. It talks about a time, a place, but also something timeless: student life, defiance, uncertainty.” 

Roy remains characteristically unsentimental. “None of us were trying to be timeless or universal or important,” she says. “We just worked with a smile on our faces. We were totally happy to be the lunatic fringe of nothing. When I think back on it now, I just have a smile.” 

Annie remains unmistakably political, but it treats politics as a way of life rather than a slogan. “Not all politics has to be furious,” Roy says. “Sometimes it’s just about allowing people to exist as they are.” 

During her conversation with THR India, her dog barked intermittently in the background. Roy acknowledged it calmly and continued, “My dog has decided to bark. Let’s see,” she said. The interruption was allowed to exist, just as it is in In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. The film makes room for noise, for drift, for unfinished thought.