Ashim Ahluwalia

In an ideal universe, I’d love the films that changed my life to be the Top 10 films of all time. This is sort of what that list could look like.

Nanami: Inferno of First Love delivers emerging adolescent sexuality and lyrical debauchery as only the Japanese New Wave can. Do not accept imitations!

End of Summer is a poignant, near-perfect film about endings, made a year before Ozu died.

Mirror offers epic hypnotherapy and some of the most beautiful celluloid ever shot.

Why can’t all film noir be like Pale Flower?

Subnarekha is one of the most intuitive, messy and haunting films ever made with the best drunk taxi ride in the history of cinema.

Pratidwandi sees Ray drop his early style for a gritty hand-held Godardian romp through ’70s Calcutta. Incredible.

A re-enactment of a re-enactment of a re-enactment, Close Up essentially destroys the very conception of a ‘documentary’ and yet is one of the best ever made.

Along with Buñuel’s Las Hurdes, Unsere Afrikareise is an understanding of all documentary as a form of colonisation. Essential.

G. Aravindan – the most interesting Indian filmmaker ever. Sadly none of his work is in distribution.

Fassbinder’s opiated take on Sunset Blvd, Veronika Voss makes Billy Wilder’s movie look like a children’s special. Voss’s drug overdose/suicide eerily foreshadows Fassbinder’s own later that same year infusing deep tragedy and new meaning to the term ‘a film about film’.