Once in a while comes a hard-hitting, moving Indian film that simply shows you a mirror to what life is for likely the vast and wretched rural majority of this country—and it is hard to watch. Siddarth Jatla’s In the Belly of a Tiger is one such film. Only his second feature, it was warmly received in the Berlin Film Festival’s Forum section. His debut, Love and Shukla, (shot on a 5D camera in 10 days), was in the Busan Film Festival.

The film opens with a frail old man being readied for the kill—he has blood applied all over his bare torso, and he will be left in the forest to attract a tiger who can gobble him up—so his family can live off the government compensation. It is the most brutal of life choices: to voluntarily let a loved one go to his death, so the others can live. In fact, the entire film is a devastating critique of capitalism. The film’s main family are an elderly couple Bhagole (Lawrence Francis) and Prabhata (Poonam Tiwari), their thoughtful, adult widowed son Saharsh (Sourabh Jaiswar) and their granddaughters Parvati (Sonali) and Chatkila (Jyoti). They live on the brink of poverty: They have been forced to sell their land in order to survive, nor could they find work in the big city, so they return home. Now they are at the mercy of whatever job they can find, at a brick kiln, at any wage the landlords choose.  It is hard to know which is a more exploitative Hobson’s choice: to let the landlords suck their blood over time--or let the tiger gobble them up at once. Saharsh, unable to cope, takes to alcoholism.