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T he title of the film Social Hygiene will remind viewers of the Covid pandemic’s cardinal rule to avoid infection—maintain social distancing to avoid infection. In fact, no two characters make physical contact in the entire film and maintain at least a 12 feet distance between each other. There is no mention of Covid or even wearing of masks in the film. Simply put, though the film was made during the pandemic, the film has nothing to do with it. Further, the film’s original script was written by the director Denis Côté in 2015, much before the onset of the pandemic.    Antonin (right) spars verbally with his love Cassiopée, while her new admirer silently watches  in the background T he film is built around the pivotal character, Antonin, married, but staying away from his wife, Eglantine. Where? In a friend’s Volkswagen! Antonin, we realize is prone to making up unreal stories, is well read, deft with language wordplay, and is a thief, vandalizing cars in the process. ...

    To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the Palm of your Hand, And Eternity in an Hour                         ---opening lines from William Blake’s poem                             “Auguries of Innocence” S ome people don’t like numbers or mathematics but many do. Whether you belong to either category, the 2003 Yomiuri-prize-winning novel by the Japanese lady Yoko Ogawa called The Housekeeper and the Professor (the English translation has been published by Picador) and Takashi Koizumi’s film The Professor and His Beloved Equation based on that novel lead you gently into the mystical world of numbers that have captivated great minds like Pythagoras and Descartes over the centuries. What Ogawa and Koizumi achieve is to make an average person look at numbers with respect and realize that numbers...

I t is rare when a feature film competes in an international film festival and wins not just the top honour for the best film but two other major awards (one for best director and one for the best actor) as well. That’s the accomplishment of Reza Mirkarimi’s Iranian film Castle of Dreams at the 2019 Shanghai International Film Festival. While Mirkarimi’s previous feature film Daughter (2016) dealt with a father-daughter protective relationship, Castle of Dreams also looks at another relationship within a family. The family relationship explored in Castle of Dreams is a more complex one, as it involves a broken family where the mostly absent father is forced by circumstances to realize that he has to take care of his two biological children whom he has neglected for long, when his wife passes away in a hospital after a sudden critical illness. Jalal (Hamed Behdad) with his sister-in-law A simple subject, one could surmise.   But the amazing screenplay plays out from start to finis...