THR India's 25 in 25: 'Court' And The Tragicomedy of Injustice
The Hollywood Reporter India picks the 25 best Indian films of the 21st century. Chaitanya Tamhane’s debut feature 'Court' is a chilling portrait of India’s judicial machinery, where every day cruelty masquerades as due process.
The circus of the judiciary, which of course continues unchanged, has rarely been depicted with the matter-of-fact chill that Chaitanya Tamhane brings to Court (2014), his first feature film. At its surface, the premise borders on the absurd: Narayan Kamble, an elderly folk singer and activist, is accused of abetting a sewage worker’s suicide through one of his songs. The charge is ludicrous, but the machinery of the state grinds on undeterred. Kamble is jailed, hearings are delayed, laws from colonial times are cited without irony, and the spectacle of endless adjournments begins.
Tamhane’s method is startling in its restraint. There are no heated arguments, no rousing monologues; the courtroom, usually a stage for oratory theatrics in Indian cinema, is instead stripped of drama. In its place, a suffocating bureaucracy asserts itself, exposing how rules and rituals meant to uphold justice often become tools of exclusion. A judge interrupts proceedings to police a woman’s blouse, lawyers move seamlessly between professional detachment and domestic normalcy, and the working poor are reduced to footnotes in their own tragedies.
What lingers most is the film’s gaze: patient, unhurried, unwilling to look away. By holding on to scenes after the “action” is over, Tamhane insists that the real story lies not in verdicts but in the textures of daily life — the fatigue of the marginalised, the inertia of institutions, the slow grind of inequity.
Court endures because it refuses catharsis. Instead, it sketches a portrait of a society where systemic cruelty is banal, almost invisible, and yet devastating in its reach. Like life, the film offers no easy answers, only clear, unflinching questions. In capturing this circus with such clarity and composure, Tamhane not only delivered one of the great Indian debuts of the century, but also a film that continues to speak urgently to the present.
Chaitanya Tamhane on Making Court
When Tamhane looks back at Court, the debut that catapulted him onto a global stage, the memories are still sharp with both fear and humour. “One day the Anti-Terrorist Squad turned up on our set saying they’d heard someone was making a documentary on Naxalwadis (Naxalites),” he recalls. “We had to hide the lead actor, Vira Sathidar. He wasn’t even shooting that day, he had just come for the free lunch. But we hadn’t yet filmed the scene where his character gets arrested, which is the inciting incident of the film. Imagine if he had actually been arrested before we shot it. It would have been super meta and ironic.” The squad left without incident, but the scare stayed with the young filmmaker, who was then only 25.
The naivety of those years, he believes, was crucial. “Not knowing the rules of the world and how things are supposed to be done has a certain power,” he says. “Pure intent, raw energy and innocence can actually lead to breaking moulds and forging your own path. Now I feel like I know too much. Back then, not knowing was liberating.”
Audiences, of course, responded in unpredictable ways. He remembers an especially biting call during the Marathi release of the film. “I was getting lots of positive feedback when suddenly I got a call from a guy. I could hear the film playing in the background, which means he was literally inside the theatre. He said, ‘What is this film you’ve made? It’s terrible. It’s boring. I want my money back.’” Tamhane laughs at the memory. “Of all the reactions, I remember that one the most. I was oddly proud, though. At least our marketing had reached someone whose taste was absolutely different.”
But for all the tough love, Court went on to win awards at the Venice Film Festival, a moment Tamhane calls “a very, very pleasant surprise” after repeated festival rejections. “We were just so happy to be there, and then to actually win. Talking later to jury members I admired, and hearing their encouragement, meant a lot to me and Vivek [Gomber] and the entire team.”
More than a decade later, Court continues to screen across India and abroad, sometimes in the unlikeliest of places. “It’s not even on any streaming platform, but people keep holding screenings,” he says. “That makes me very happy. At the same time, it’s sad that the film feels more relevant today than when it was made. Things that seemed slightly exaggerated back then are now just daily news. That’s the reality of the times we live in.”