Axone

A group of friends from north east India living in a Delhi neighbourhood decide to surprise Minam, who is about to be married, by cooking her favourite dish, axone, made with fermented soybean paste. The smell is pungent and the neighbours will not put up with it; as the day goes on the matter stops being about the smell at all. Under the film’s comedy lies the racist remarks, the exclusion and the sense of being out of place that people from the north east meet every day in Delhi, where even deciding what to cook becomes a struggle. In Nicholas Kharkongor’s ninety six minute Indian film, Sayani Gupta, Lin Laishram and Dolly Ahluwalia appear, with Adil Hussain in the cast. It was completed in 2019 and was released in India on Netflix in 2020.