Midnight's Children

Midnight's Children (2012) is a Canadian-British adaptation of Salman Rushdie's landmark novel, directed by Deepa Mehta — watch online on iFILM. Rushdie wrote the screenplay himself and voices the narrator; that level of authorial involvement in an adaptation is genuinely rare. The story follows Saleem Sinai, born at the precise second India gained independence from Britain.

At midnight on August 15, 1947, a thousand other children are born across the country — each with a different power. Saleem's life runs in lockstep with the nation's: Partition, the Bangladesh Liberation War, the crackdown of the 1975 Emergency. Shabana Azmi and Charles Dance play the adults who shape him; Satya Bhabha carries the full span of fifty turbulent years on screen.

Mehta holds onto the novel's hallucinatory, event-dense quality without stripping out the politics. Stream Midnight's Children online on iFILM.