Uski Roti ( A Day's Bread)

 Mani Kaul was one of the few film-makers whose work was very different than the other directors of Indian parallel cinema. Mani Kaul was understandably the one who attempted to modernize the language of Indian cinema.  Robert  Bresson influenced him greatly.  Kaul started with the image  and made his way into the text.  Kaul said that " And I know that when the shot finds its place, it has a quality of holding you. The position is its meaning". The slow narrative provided him to hold part of the story untold, making audiences linger on the images.
    
Uski Roti was Mani Kaul's first feature film. This was a poetic film about waiting.  The plot was very simple. A woman took food out to the road for her  driver husband.  The husband didn't care about her. He only stopped his bus there when he had a passenger to pick up.   He had a mistress in other town. 

We noticed Bresson's influence in many aspects of film-making here : the delayed editing of shots, the priority  on objects rather than concepts, the several shots of hands and faces that have a beauty of their own etc.  Camera  strongly captured the texture of the village and its natives.  The most  striking thing about  Uski  Roti was the way Kaul fully discarded the conventions  of narrative cinema by dispensing with the plot.   This was  one of the great works of Indian art cinema.