A still from Dabba

A still from Dabba

Ritesh Batra’s Dabba (The Lunch box) has been selected for the prestigious Cannes Critics Week, which will run alongside the main festival next month.

The film is about a sequence of events that take place after a lunch box is delivered at a wrong address by Mumbai’s famous Dabbawallahs. A wrongly delivered dabba connects a housewife Ila Singh to Saajan Thomas, a lonely man in the dawn of his life and they build a fantasy life together. Gradually, this fantasy threatens to overwhelm their reality.

The film features Irrfan Khan and Nawazuddin Siddiqui in lead roles. It is produced by Sikhya Entertainment (India) and DAR Motion Pictures (India) and co-produced by National Film Development Corporation (India), ASAP Films (France) and Rohfilm (Germany).

Portuguese director Miguel Gomes will preside over the jury for this year’s Critics Week, which runs from May 16 to May 24. The Cannes festival begins on May 15 and end on May 26. Seven first and second feature films are selected from all over the world for competition in the Critics Week. Apart from Grand Prix, FIPRESCI and Visionary Jury awards, these films also compete for the Camera d’Or.

Besides Dabba, two Indian films are in the official selection of the Cannes film festival this year — Bombay Talkies by Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee, Zoya Akhtar and Karan Johar will have a gala screening, while there will be a midnight screening for Amit Kumar’s Monsoon Shootout.