Manish Mundra’s Siya, with Pooja Pandey and Vineet Kumar Singh, is sensitive and tasteful, but without any surprises

Spoilers ahead…

Manish Mundra produced ‘Masaan’ and ‘Newton’, and in his directorial debut, he displays a similar sensibility. The staging is superb, and the film is exquisitely shot. 

Within the first few scenes, Manish Mundra’s Siya lays out the world of its 17-year-old protagonist. (Pooja Pandey plays Siya.) It’s a world without toilets for women. It’s a world where younger brothers go to school while older sisters have to drop out. It’s a world where women are sexually harassed by powerful men, bearing caste names like Thakur. It’s a world where a mother feels her daughter should get married instead of taking up a job. It’s a world that young women want to escape, and that’s what Siya tells the sympathetic Mahendar (Vineet Kumar Singh): she wants to go to Delhi and be with her chachi, her aunt. He tells her she is just a child and Delhi is a big city. But that’s probably why she wants to go there. The smallness of this life is suffocating her. 

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https://www.galatta.com/hindi/movie/review/siya/

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