Raam Reddy’s The Fable had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival last week. It is his second feature after Thithi, in 2015, which won two Golden Leopards at Locarno, for Best Film and Best First Film. The Fable, an Indo-US co-production starring Manoj Bajpayee, Priyanka Bose, Deepak Dobriyal and Tillotama Shome, played in the prestigious Encounters section at Berlin. Significantly, the film was shot on 16mm celluloid film—a rare feat in India.

At its core, the film has a heart-warming Ken Loach-like concern about class differences and feudal exploitation, but these are intertwined with magical realism. In effect, the film plays out as a part-mystery, part-thriller, part-philosophical exploration. Manoj Bajpayee plays Dev, owner of the vast Theen Pahad orchard estate set in the Uttarakhand Himalayas in 1989, near the Indo-Nepal border. He lives with his family in a sprawling colonial-style bungalow—wife Nandini (Priyanka Bose), and two kids, the horse-riding teenage girl Vanya, and younger kid Juju, who speak in English at home. But there are elements of magic realism too—Dev very matter-of-factly puts on a pair of enormous wings and leaps off the cliff—then  glides the thermals.  A pair of young lovers communicate telepathically.