Mantra (2016)

Kapil Kapoor built a successful potato-chips company in the years before India opened its economy, but now the global brands have arrived and his business is sinking. At home things are no better: his wife is distant and his grown children are each going their own way, one chasing a start-up dream, one drifting, one trying to find a footing in a city that has changed around them. Mantra moves between these family members over a short period, showing how economic change seeps into marriages, ambitions and loyalties. Written and directed by Nicholas Kharkongor, a theatre director from Meghalaya, it is a quiet, character-driven ensemble film anchored by Rajat Kapoor, and one of the few Hindi films to look at life after liberalisation from inside a middle-class business family.