A new and revised edition of the screenplay for In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, the 1989 film written by author Arundhati Roy, is set to release this month, Penguin Random House India announced on Wednesday.
Thirty-eight years after its creation, the film’s damaged negative was recovered and restored in 4K by the Film Heritage Foundation recently.
The restored version of the film will hit theatres on Friday. Fans can get the screenplay signed by the author at Nariman Point’s Inox Cinema and Connaught Place’s PVR Plaza on March 13 and March 14, respectively.
Sharing the announcement on Instagram, the publishing house wrote, “Don’t miss the opportunity to pick up a copy of Penguin’s new edition of Arundhati Roy’s original screenplay of In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones and have it signed by the cast and crew at the special screenings of the restored film on March 13, 2026 at 6.30 p.m. at Inox Cinema, Nariman Point, Mumbai and on March 14, 2026 at PVR Plaza, Connaught Place, Delhi at 6.30 p.m.”
Roy, a Booker Prize-winning author, penned the screenplay and also appeared in a major role in the film, which was originally made for Indian public broadcaster Doordarshan.
Set in an architecture school in Delhi in the mid-1970s, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones is a campus comedy that follows Anand Grover, nicknamed Annie by his friends, a misguided visionary who lands in trouble after mocking the college principal, Y D Billimoria, known as Yamdoot.
Directed by Pradip Krishen, the film featured a young Shah Rukh Khan and Manoj Bajpayee in small but significant roles, alongside lead performances by Arjun Raina, Roshan Seth and Roy herself. Khan and Bajpayee were both part of the Delhi theatre circuit at the time.
The story was partly inspired by Roy’s own experiences studying architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi. It marked her first screenplay. Roy and Krishen had earlier worked together on the 1985 colonial-era drama Massey Sahib and later reunited for 1992’s Electric Moon, again with Roy writing and Krishen directing.
“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,” Roy wrote in the introduction of the book.
Commemorating the restoration and the film’s lasting resonance on a cultural level, the new edition of the screenplay includes new introductions by Roy, Krishen and Dungarpur, offering a glimpse of the making of the film, the loss and recovery of its negative and its restoration.
“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,” the 64-year-old author said in a statement.
“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,” she added.
