Kanche (2015)

In 1944 Dhupati Haribabu is a soldier of the British Indian Army on a dangerous mission behind German lines in Italy. As his unit fights to rescue trapped comrades, he recalls his life in a village in Andhra Pradesh, where he, a man of a lower caste, fell in love with Sita, the daughter of the local zamindar, and where his childhood friend became his bitterest enemy. The film cuts between the battlefield and the village, setting the barbarity of world war against the everyday barbarity of caste. Kanche ("fence") won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Telugu and was praised for its scale, its war sequences and its ambition, rare for Telugu cinema. It was Pragya Jaiswal's Telugu breakthrough.