Screenplay of Arundhati Roy’s ‘In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones’ to release in revised edition

A revised and updated edition of the screenplay of 1989 film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, written by award-winning author Arundhati Roy, is set to release this month, Penguin Random House India (PRHI) announced on Wednesday.

Set in 1974 in a school of architecture, the film, directed by filmmaker and environmentalist Pradip Krishen, follows a group of “dope-smoking, bellbottom-wearing and vaguely idealistic” final-year students racing to complete their theses.

Thirty-eight years after the film was made, its damaged negative was recovered and restored in 4K by the Film Heritage Foundation, led by its founder Shivendra Singh Dungarpur.

The restored version will hit the theatres on Friday.

“If not for the Film Heritage Foundation and Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s several years’ long dogged perseverance and stubborn love for the film, and if not for Pradip’s carefully archived material, ‘In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones’ would not have had the opportunity to take a bow in the real world before retiring to a resting place in some dim archive,” writes Roy in the book’s introduction.

The new edition of the screenplay commemorates the restoration and the film’s continuing cultural resonance.

It includes new introductions by Roy, Krishen, and Dungarpur, offering readers insights into the making of the film, the loss and recovery of its negative, and its remarkable afterlife.

“Why does this small, scrappy little film, made 38 years ago, keep surfacing from its life underground? It’s what certain films and books and songs do. And we’ll never really know why. In Annie’s case, I believe it’s because all of us, every single person in the cast and crew, worked on it with joy.

“Together we were a band, jamming together, jiving to the same drumbeat. There really are no stars. It was all of us. It’s what gives the film its irreverence, its lightness of touch,” the 64-year-old author added.

The Delhi-based author is known for her award-winning novels like The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and her essays compiled in The End of Imagination, The Doctor and The Saint, and The Algebra of Infinite Justice.

Roy’s latest book, Mother Mary Comes to Me, was recently conferred the ‘Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award’ 2026.