English, August

Agastya Sen – “August” – is a young, English-speaking Indian of the first post-Independence generation, training to become an officer in the Indian Administrative Service. Posted to the remote town of Madna for a year of training, he finds himself a stranger in a landscape that is, on paper, his own.
Amid oppressive heat and Kafkaesque bureaucracy, he drifts through his duties among a gallery of eccentrics: a pompous district head, a pot-smoking cartoonist and a police superintendent with a taste for pornography. As boredom and isolation deepen, he retreats into an interior world of music, fantasy and philosophical reflection.
Madna becomes a site of confrontation with a country he cannot fully inhabit, and a self shaped by that disconnection. English, August is a darkly comic portrait of a generation caught between a colonial past and an uncertain future.

Meeting August was like looking into a mirror. Like me, he grew up on Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and rock and roll – the soundtrack of a generation born after Independence yet still shaped by colonialism.
He prefers to be called August. The distance between that name and Agastya became the emotional heart of the film.
I’ve always thought of English, August as an autocritique of my own generation. We were educated in English, immersed in a global culture, yet often disconnected from the realities of the country we called home.
What surprised me was how funny that predicament could be. Humour and savageness became inseparable. The India of this film is many planets in one country. I wanted those worlds to keep their contradictions, humour, and effervescence – a portrait of a young Indian adrift inside his own country.

PRODUCTION:
Film Heritage Foundation - Mr. Shivendra Singh Dungarpur
707, Arun Chambers, Tardeo Road,
400034 Mumbai, India
Tel: +91 2267367777
E-mail: contact@filmheritagefoundation.co.in
Web: https://filmheritagefoundation.co.in/
Social Media: filmheritagefoundation - Facebook

PRODUCTION AT THE TIME OF FILMING: 
​Anuradha Parikh - Fabienne Servan Schreiber

CO-PRODUCTION AT THE TIME OF FILMING:
A Tropicfilm-Cinétévé-La Sept Cinema

LAB:
L’Immagine Ritrovata

WORLD SALES:
Film Heritage Foundation - Mr. Shivendra Singh Dungarpur
707, Arun Chambers, Tardeo Road,
400034 Mumbai, India
Tel: +91 2267367777
E-mail: contact@filmheritagefoundation.co.in
Web: https://filmheritagefoundation.co.in/
Social Media: filmheritagefoundation – Facebook

ITALIAN DISTRIBUTION:
Film Heritage Foundation - Mr. Shivendra Singh Dungarpur
707, Arun Chambers, Tardeo Road,
400034 Mumbai, India
Tel: +91 2267367777
E-mail: contact@filmheritagefoundation.co.in
Web: https://filmheritagefoundation.co.in/
Social Media: filmheritagefoundation - Facebook

PRESS OFFICE:
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur - Film Heritage Foundation
Tel: +91 9820153836
E-mail: contact@filmheritagefoundation.co.in