For those unfamiliar with Indian-Pakistani writer Saadat Hasan Manto, Nandita Das’ inspired Manto offers a heady introduction to one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Pungent, violent, sexual and shocking, his short stories written in the Urdu language of northern India in the 1930s and ‘40s recall Isaac Babel in their brevity and lethal impact. Many of them are re-enacted in the film and woven into the writer’s biography so seamlessly that they seem to be part of his unquiet life.