13-year-old Bharat is struggling with adolescence in a patriarchal Mumbai suburb. His parents’ marriage is in crisis; the building bully constantly torments him for being too girly; and his only friend is a childish 11-year-old. Meera, a beautiful cosmopolitan woman from the big city, moves in next door and immediately causes a stir. Bharat is drawn to her and they pursue an unlikely friendship. When Meera introduces him to jazz and teaches him how to dance with a woman, he glimpses a world of exciting possibilities. But when he stumbles upon a dark secret from her past, Bharat is forced to choose: is Meera a woman of bad character like everyone says, or the smart, sensitive person he knows? How he reacts will determine the man he will grow up to be.

 THE TENANT introduces viewers to how teenagers negotiate India’s conservative gender codes. It also shows how women, when living on their own terms, are the target of gossip, desire and disdain. With sensitive perception, director Sushrut Jain drives home these cultural realities in a story of a boy standing alone in treating a woman with dignity, allowing the viewer to sift through the film’s memorable moments and be leavened by its lessons.

This film is part of a special program entitled “Childhood on Edge”, curated by the legendary Uma da Cunha, who has been IFFLA’s Programming Advisor since the festival’s inception in 2002. The program features six films with diverse characters on the verge of the momentous transformation from childhood to adulthood. 

DIRECTOR

Sushrut Jain is an award-winning filmmaker driven by the desire to capture the drama of everyday Indian life. Born and raised in Mumbai, Sushrut came to the United States to pursue graduate work in Economics at Stanford University where he hoped to learn to solve the problems he saw growing up in a developing India. But his desire for a more humanistic approach to these problems and a passion for storytelling eventually led him to enroll in the graduate film program at USC. His debut short film ANDHERI (2009) was an official selection at the prestigious Clermont-Ferrand Festival, and went on to play at over 40 film festivals worldwide. He then directed a feature-length documentary centered around the 2011 World Cup of Cricket, BEYOND ALL BOUNDARIES(2013). The film, co-produced and narrated by Kunal Nayyar of THE BIG BANG THEORY, won several awards at film festivals in the US, and was acquired by a major Indian TV channel.