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“India embraces the cinema of the whole world…In a future issue, I shall show why India is the creation of the whole world.”
Jean-Luc Godard

It has been 14 long years since an Indian Film has made the Competition Selection of the Cannes International Film Festival. And that particular Competition Selection, Shaji Karun’s second feature Swaham (1994), happens to be the only instance for the decade of the 90s. Around the time, some of Shaji Karun’s well wishers, prompted by Andrew Robinson’s comparison of the debut features, pompously declared that “there are only two Indian films - Pather Panchali (1955) & Piravi (1988). Period.” What is common to both the films, & the probable reason for the latter film’s exaltation, is a certain institution that has consistently, for the last six decades, managed to play world cinema’s official conscience-keeper & harbinger of the evolution of cinema itself - the Cannes International …