Collection
Published 6 November 2026
6:00pm
It always catches me by surprise just how quickly Diwali season comes around every year. And this time, there’s an even bigger reason to celebrate: the Hindu mythological epic filmRamayana – Rise of a Legendis taking over IMAX screens for the festive season.
At SBS on Demand’s curatedCelebrating Diwali/Deepavalihub, new and exciting titles are here to help you get ready for the Festival of Lights while unpacking core themes of renewal and rejuvenation that make this time of year so special for so many people around the world.
Embracing Love
Andaz Apna Apna
Every Hindi cinema lover growing up in the nineties in India knew this film. It’s hard to overstate the cultural impact ofAndaz Apna Apna(1994), a film that bombed at the domestic box office upon release but earned a deserved cult-like status over time. As an annoying teenager, I had an unspoken rule: don’t befriend anyone who didn’t catch the references from this film when I innocently dropped them mid-conversation. This movie had an entire generation of millennials in a chokehold, growing up on a staple diet of Bollywood films. Part of the appeal of this film is its uniqueness — Gen Z today would call it the natural precursor to a ‘brainrot’ film — and nothing like it has come along since. A film that brazenly defies convention: it’s a Mel Brooks-style spoof, a screwball comedy, and, equally, an ardent love letter to everything that makes mainstream Hindi cinema lovable and slightly off-kilter. Sadly, this is also the last time two of Hindi cinema’s biggest stars — Aamir Khan and Salman Khan — shared screen space as co-leads and were irreverent enough to laugh at themselves. Gosh, I miss those days!
Nothing quite compares, but the closest I can think of is Elaine May’sThe Heartbreak Kid(1972). Both films are about grifters trying to get ahead by hook or by crook and dealing with the curveballs life throws back. What I’m trying to say is, if we are going to be friends, you’ve got to get with the program and watchAndaz Apna Apna.
Andaz Apna Apnais streaming at SBS on Demand.
Rangeela
Talking of Aamir Khan brings me toRangeela(1995). Before Ram Gopal Varma became known for going off the rails and sharing idiosyncratic hot takes on social media platforms, he had a generational run as a director from 1989-2003 across Telugu and Hindi-language films. It’s easy to forget, but Varma’s guerrilla-style shoots and exploration of the Mumbai crime underbelly influenced Anurag Kashyap (who co-wrote the screenplay for Varma’sSatya) and Danny Boyle.
Varma deserves credit as one of the few directors with the gumption to launch films with new talent in a film industry that’s notoriously difficult for outsiders to break into. Varma gave the now-veteran actor Manoj Bajpayee (whom you can watch deliver a stellar performance inGulmohar) a star-making turn in the crime dramaSatyain 1998. Varma’sRangeelaalso made the film’s female lead, Urmila Matondkar, an overnight star, even though Khan was the bigger draw at the time.
Rangeelais a love letter to the golden era of Hollywood musicals likeSingin’ in the Rain— a dance sequence in the film nods to Debbie Reynolds’s ladder scene from the musical — offering a fresh take on the classic template of an unknown girl dreaming of becoming the nation’s next heartthrob. The film includes a confrontation sequence reminiscent ofWest Side Story(1961). What’s interesting aboutRangeelais that, because the world of the movie revolves around a film set, the musical dance numbers complement the film’s internal logic incredibly well.Rangeelaalso introduced Hindi-language audiences to the genius of music composer A.R. Rahman for the first time, and the film’s soundtrack remains one of the landmark albums in Indian cinema history.
Rangeela is streaming at SBS on Demand.
Tamasha
Actor Ranbir Kapoor has made a career out of playing man-children on screen, embodying the Peter-Pan syndrome. Despite that handicap, director Imtiaz Ali pulls off an amazing magic trick — hoodwinking the audience with the most palatable version of a man-child we’ve seen in recent times. And you know the worst part? It works! Despite every cell in my brain telling me this shouldn’t work, it does.
Kapoor plays Ved, a man searching for self-actualisation, stuck between playing the corporate slave the world expects and embracing a more carefree self that doesn’t quite fit a nine-to-five life. While on holiday in Corsica, he meets Tara (Deepika Padukone), but both pretend to be different individuals and hide their true selves. More than a decade since its release,Tamasha(2015) is a really interesting film to revisit. It tapped into real inter-generational anxieties among Indian youth, and the suffocation and unfulfillment many young Indians felt around pursuing a corporate career in late-stage capitalism. More importantly, this film is also an ambitious and sensitive attempt at trying to start a discussion around male mental health and the stigma it carries, a topic rarely touched upon in mainstream Hindi cinema, let alone with such a creative flourish.
Tamasha is streaming at SBS on Demand.
Eliminating Darkness
The Elysian Field
Rarely do you come across a film that leaves you as speechless and stunned as Pradip Kurbah’sThe Elysian Field(2025). This gem of a movie is one of the most profoundly intimate portraits of a community I’ve seen in recent times, and it continues to haunt me to no end. Set against the backdrop of a dystopian future where India is celebrating a hundred years since independence in 1947, the film traces the lives of the last six remaining members of the Laitduh village, who seem to have been all but forgotten and left to their own devices in the remote Khasi Hills of Meghalaya, while the outside world has moved on. The film’s English title —The Elysian Field— embodies an interesting duality.
On the one hand, you could read it as a prayer for a more hopeful afterlife, a desire for a future better than the miserable present the surviving villagers find themselves in. On the other hand, it could also be read as a wake-up call from Kurbah, urging his community to avoid the pessimistic fate that befalls Laitduh. In Kurbah’s sentimentalism, one finds strokes of Frederick Wiseman’s community-forward lens (such as the humanism ofIn Jackson Heights) infused with Ken Loach’s political subtext of how a post-capitalist order has eroded our sense of collective purpose and community (as inSorry We Missed You). This film forced me to sit with the uncomfortable truth that we are losing connection with our regional and remote communities as the world becomes an increasingly disconnected and alienating urban jungle. I cannot recommend this film highly enough!
The Elysian Field is streaming at SBS on Demand.
Shambhala
From one stunning film to another, director Min Bahadur Bham’s sophomore featureShambhala(2024) starts as a fly-on-the-wall, humanist window into Himalayan life and a culture audiences may not be familiar with. But the film gradually evolves into a more pointed look at misogynistic attitudes prevalent in the community and a journey towards liberation for the lead female protagonist, Pema (an incredible performance that anchors the entire film by Thinley Lhamo).
Pema is in a traditional polyandric arrangement with three siblings, and the opening sections of the film show the interpersonal dynamic she shares with her three partners. Shambhala truly shines in the middle section: as Pema sets off in search of one of her partners, her arduous journey across the Himalayas (captured in all its stunning beauty by cinematographer Aziz Jan Baki) becomes a catalyst for introspection. Co-written with Bham and Abinash Bikram Shah (whose filmElephants in the Fogjust won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year), this is slow cinema at its best, and rewards the patient viewer with an emotionally cathartic payoff.
Shambhala is streaming at SBS on Demand.
Harishchandrachi Factory
Marathi cinema has quietly made some of the best films to come out of India without much fanfare, andHarishchandrachi Factory(2009) is a great testament to that. A spiritual biopic of Dadasaheb Phalke, widely regarded as the ‘father of Indian cinema’, the film charts Phalke’s trials and tribulations in making India’s very first black-and-white silent feature film titledRaja Harishchandra(1913). This is both a soft biopic and a period film, with delightful production and set design that take us back to a recreation of early 1900s India.
My favourite thing about this wonderful film is the artful touches. For example, in certain sequences, the film accurately recreates the experience of watching an early silent film, before the talkies era took hold. These details elevate the film from a run-of-the-mill biography into something with a distinctive visual flair. While it’s a soft biopic for the most part, it also doubles up as a love letter to the movies (seeRangeelaabove). So, if you love movies about movies — this would make for an excellent double withSupermen of Malegaon(2008), also streaming on SBS — then this film is for you.
Harishchandrachi Factory is streaming at SBS on Demand.
Being the Light in Someone’s Life
Hotel Salvation
Upon realising his time on earth is up, an elderly man (Lalit Behl) takes his son (Adil Hussain) with him to check into a hotel in Varanasi where people go to die to attain salvation. Once there, he decides he might not want to die after all. Director Shubhashish Bhutiani draws you into this world and its characters — which seem ludicrous at first — by punctuating the narrative’s dramatic beats, rather than playing up the humour embedded in the premise’s absurdity.
The setting ofHotel Salvation(2016) in the holy city of Varanasi is vital. The place is unlike any other in the world — where spiritual, religious and geographical ecosystems converge. There is a broader relevance to this: Varanasi is where the various belief systems and ways of thinking come together and meet in one place and, consequently, the one place where the many pluralities of India — the small towns, the big cities, the upper class, the middle class—come together, if only for a moment in time. The film is a multi-generational allegory of an India caught between embracing its newfound modernisation and liberalism while staying true to its traditional roots.
Hotel Salvation is streaming at SBS on Demand.
Late Bloomer
A semi-autobiographical take on the life of popular content creator and YouTuber Jus Reign,Late Bloomeris a hilarious comedy of errors following Jasmeet Dutta, a Sikh millennial comedian in Canada who feels like a perennial misfit. Keeping the funny aside, what really moved me about this series is the honest self-assessment about how first-generation migrants feel like outsiders in both worlds: their own culture, as well as the culture they are expected to embrace, and the self-loathing that can accompany the pressure of having to live up to external standards constantly. I was taken in by the undertone of pathos this show carries, calling out the fact that this feeling of being an imposter doesn’t leave you easily, no matter how much of a ‘model minority’ you might become.
Late Bloomer is streaming at SBS on Demand.
Embracing Magic
Slumdog Millionaire
Director Danny Boyle recently admitted in an interview that he couldn’t makeSlumdog Millionaire(2008) today, and would look for a young Indian filmmaking voice to tell the story instead. This is an important ‘line in the sand’ cultural moment: an acclaimed director having the courage and hindsight to admit that perhaps he wasn’t the right person for the story, even if the story itself was interesting enough to be told. And that really is the complication with this film. The film’s reception in Hollywood (it won eight Academy Awards out of ten nominations, including Best Original Score for A.R. Rahman) sits uncomfortably at odds with how it was received back in India.
Ask anyone of Indian origin what they think ofSlumdog Millionaire, and they will have mixed feelings. As the film nears its twentieth anniversary, I am really glad we are finally having these difficult conversations. Not just about what stories get told, but equally about whose perspective they are told from and why that matters. Still, I will be eternally grateful thatSlumdog Millionairemade Dev Patel a bonafide star (if you hadn’t already noticed him in the teen dramaSkins). So maybe, just maybe, we can have some good things in this world.
Slumdog Millionaire is streaming at SBS on Demand.
The Queen of My Dreams
I cannot stop gushing about the delicious wordplay in the title of this queer coming-of-age film.The Queen of My Dreams(2023) is an English translation of the title of a popular Hindi-language romantic song from the filmAradhana(1969), where the male lead tries to serenade the heroine. This heterosexual setup is subverted in Fawzia Mirza’s directorial debut, where the film’s title doubles up as a tongue-in-cheek reference to a same sex partner.
Based on Mirza’s 2012 short of the same name, the feature explores young Pakistani-Canadian Azra’s (Amrit Kaur) attempts to keep her same-sex relationship secret from her conservative Pakistani extended family after the unexpected death of her father. While it begins as a light-hearted coming-of-age drama, the film truly shines in its sombre exploration of the strained relationship between Azra and her mother (a delightful turn by Nimra Bucha). The film uses parallel timelines — Azra’s and her mother’s — to show how both women navigated the pressures of fitting into a patriarchal society in different ways, and the cost they bore. In doing so, this film attempts an interesting rope-a-dope: it’s more an indictment of regressive attitudes towards women in South Asian cultures than a straightforward coming-of-age drama. It lures you in with frothiness only to land a sucker punch of tears by the end.
The Queen of My Dreams is streaming at SBS on Demand.
These films and more are part of theCELEBRATING DIWALI / DEEPAVALI COLLECTIONat SBS On Demand.
