HIS DAILY BREAD

Mani Kaul

India

- 1969

Balo is a woman from a village in northern India, whose whole life is bound by tradition. Her husband, Suchcha Sing, is a bus driver who passes a few miles from the village every day. Only on Tuesdays does he visit her. Every other day is spent drinking and playing cards with colleagues. Balo walks two miles every day to a desolate bus stop to hand her husband his lunch. One day she is late because her 14-year-old sister was assaulted by one of the village boys. Suchcha Sing is furious about his wife’s behaviour and refuses the meal.

Mani Kaul

Director born in Jodhpur, Rajasthan (1942-2011). He studied screenwriting and directing at Rajasthan College in Jaipur (1963) and at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII, 1966). His first film ‘His Daily Bread’ (1969), won the 1970 Filmfare Critics Award for Best Movie and defined much of New Indian Cinema’s formal vocabulary. In 1973 he made ‘In Two Minds’, his first film in colour. After that, he worked with forbidding regularity on an imposing oeuvre in both fiction and documentary, with films like ‘In Two Minds’ (1973), ‘Arrival’ (1980), ‘Mind of Clay’ (1985) or ‘The Servant’s Shirt’ (1999), among others.