Dir: Deepa Mehta
English, Hindi with English subtitles 148 minutes
Principal Cast: Satya Bhabha, Shahana Goswami, Rajat Kapoor
A Gala Presentation at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival®, this momentous collaboration between Academy Award®–nominated director Deepa Mehta (the trilogy Fire, Earth and Water, Heaven on Earth) and celebrated novelist Salman Rushdie is an epic saga that spans borders, generations, wars and fragile peace as it chronicles a pivotal time in India’s history.
Rushdie’s inspired adaptation of his own Booker Prize–winning novel follows the destinies of a pair of children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very instant that India claimed its independence from Great Britain—and which, in Rushdie’s brilliant magic realist conceit, endows the children born on the same night as their country’s liberation with supernatural abilities ranging from flight to invisibility, with those born closest to midnight possessing the most powerful gift.
“Handcuffed to history,” and switched at birth by a nurse in a Bombay hospital, Saleem Sinai (Satya Bhabha), the son of a poor single mother, and Shiva (Siddharth), scion of a wealthy family, are condemned to live out the fate intended for the other. Imbued with mysterious telepathic powers, their lives become strangely intertwined and inextricably linked to their country’s careening journey through the tumultuous twentieth century.
An irreverent epic of Shakespearean proportions, shot through with moments of arresting intimacy, Midnight’s Children is a production of truly impressive scope, featuring state-of-the-art computer graphics, impressive production design by the director’s brother Dilip Mehta, and sixty-two locations. A luxurious feast of a film brimming with romance, spectacle, intrigue, sly social commentary and uplifting optimism, Midnight’s Children is as vast and beguiling as the great country to which it pays homage.
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