‘A Suitable Boy’ becomes the first ever TV series to close Toronto Film Fest

Amidst the COVID-19 global pandemic, culture, art, TV and cinema has been affected largely. A lot of the new releases and festivities had been postponed all over the world. In such unusual times, the Toronto Film Festival came to end by featuring a TV series for the first time ever in its 45 years of history.

The closing night of the festival didn’t end with a presentation of a film, but with the television series. Mira Nair’s A Suitable Boy became the first TV series to be screened at the closing of the festival.

The screening duration of the show was six hours, covering the complete series produced for BBC, with two intervals of 20-minutes each for those attending physically.

A Suitable Boy, adapted by Indian origin Director Mira Nair from Vikram Seth’s classic novel is set in the period of post-partition of the Indian sub-continent. Nair said this was the only format to do justice to Seth’s monumental work: “A Suitable Boy cannot be a two-and-a-half-hour film; it should not be. It should be at least six hours; in the way I’ve tried to do it but it could be even longer.”

Although the novel was first published in 1993, many of its topics stayed relevant, including ‘common fault lines.’ Nair took the original “distillation” of the novel and “brought a great deal of politics back from the narrative of the novel” instead of making it just one about the leading actor Lata having to choose among three suitors. The series has been released on Netflix.

Tanya Maniktala, who played the role of Lata, was selected as one of TIFF’s Rising Stars. The cast include; Ishaan Khattar, Tabu, Namit Das, Rasika Dugal and Ranvir Shorey.

New York-based Nair couldn’t make it in person for the closing night screening because of the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions. She was recently honored at TIFF this year with the Tribute Award alongside Kate Winslet, Sir Anthony Hopkins, and Director Chloe Zhao.

The festival closed with the first two episodes of Nair’s A Suitable Boy (pictured), a six-part TV drama that debuted on the BBC in the UK (July 26).