The Indian Film Festival of Melbourne is one of the largest Indian Film Festivals outside of India. This year’s festival which will run from August 10 – 22 has some very interesting Indian films in the short film and documentary segment.

Among them is Akshay Singh’s Pinky Beauty Parlour, an engaging tale of two sisters who run a beauty parlour and live in a society obsessed with fair skin. The film features Akshay himself alongwith Sulagna Panigrahi and Vishwanath Chatterjee who plays a cop in the film.

Amar Kaushik’s directorial debut, Aaba, which has screened and won awards at many film festivals also heads to Melbourne. The movie, set in a village of Arunachal Pradesh, revolves around a young girl who has lost her parents and lives with her grandparents. Her relationship with her grandfather who is in the advanced stage of cancer and an intrinsic perspective on the mystery called ‘death’ form the core of this story.

The documentary by Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya, The Cinema Travellers premiered at Cannes last year and won the special jury award for best documentary alongwith several other awards across festivals. The movie showcases the journey of showmen who travel with reels of cinema to the rural village audiences, and how the times and technology has changed. It’s a poignant story of how olden cinema is till kept alive in the rural pockets.

With such interesting titles, one can surely expect the finest of cinema at Indian Film Festival of Melbourne 2017.