In the Belly of a Tiger Movie Review — Berlinale 2024 — Sucharita Tyagi

Sucharita Tyagi
3 min readMar 3, 2024

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You know, is baar Berlinale mein jitni Indian films gayi, feature-length ki, sabmein ya toh magic realism, ya toh kuch divinity ka common concept that hi tha.

Do ki baat hum kar chuke hain, aao teesri aur aakhiri par aate hain.

Before or after you watch this review, also watch my interview with the filmmaker Jatla, I’ll link it here mere sir ke oopar. Yeh zaroori isliye hai kyunki aisi film banaa, with a subject that is moving, and so very very real, uske liye the filmmaker has to have honest motives and intentions, going into the film. Watch the interview and decide karna ki kya lagta hai.

To give you a little premise, In The Belly Of A Tiger, is a story of a small Indian village jahaan nearly every farmer family is living in an impoverished state, with no farmlands to their name, no work, and no redressal systems, people from each family are forced to work for bare minimum wages at the local brick factory. The conditions are inhumane, and the people running the factory are even worse. The village is located in an area jahaan aas paas jungle hai, toh when a family runs entirely out of options, a member goes into the forest, smears blood on themselves to lure the tiger, in an attempt to sacrifice themselves to the beast, jis se ki sarkaar se muaawza miley. Local politicians try to use the village for their gain, “rashtriya pashu ka rashtriya mudda na bann jaaye” one man says out loud. Iske beech mein, a family returns from out of town, to come back to the village, not knowing what the future holds.

Jatla Sidharth

Saharsh is the young man of the family, responsible for his aging parents, and single father to his two young daughters. In his heart he knows ki kitna bhi kaam karey, there is no escaping the tyranny of the brick kiln manager, and the misery that is life. The two releases the people of this village are low-budget theatre shows about gods and goddesses put up by local companies, and cheap alcohol, the latter option only available to men. Will Saharsh be able to find a path for his family, or will the system devour him as well?

Jatla, who shares writing credits with Amanda Mooney, isn’t just talking about the apathy of systems towards people of rural India, but also about the trappings of patriarchy that harm men, occasionally just as much as they do women. But he’s also wondering and exploring, does oppression really SEE gender, a pregnant woman will get a job lifting bricks and breaking stones all day, but an older man can’t for fear of him dying on the job and the manager having to deal with paperwork. Saharsh, a name that means joyful and happy is a soft-hearted man forced to harden himself to the brutal reality of the world he lives in. “They’ll train us to count our pain as blessings he says”.

After this, Jatla focuses his story more on Saharsh’s older parents, a couple with an actual love story, a life lived with sneh and pyaar, now considering being eaten by the tiger for money. The parents are Hindu, they are believers, and have faith ki iss janam mein nahi, agli life mein things will be better. Through these two, and the final act of the film, you are made to think not just about the broken and poor citizens of this country, but also about the role religion plays in our lives. Is devotion just a way to numb one’s pain, the opium of the masses?

Again, no way of knowing when and where you’ll get to watch the movie, but do keep an eye out both for In The Belly Of A Tiger, and its director Jatla Sidharth.

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Sucharita Tyagi
Sucharita Tyagi

Written by Sucharita Tyagi

Sab pop-culture aur films ki baatein idhar hi hain. #WomenTellingWomensStories Enquiries- forsucharita@gmail.com

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