What has Malayalam cinema gained from all these film festivals? That is a question that one gets to hear year after year, during the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK). The concern of those who ask this question is not misplaced, for those who actually make movies are never seen at the festivals.
Consequently, there has been not much of experimentation outside the mainstream from even the new crop of film-makers over the past two decades. The ones that appear rarely have been coming from the old-timers, the products of the film society movement.
But, now we have a young band of wildly experimental film-makers, pointing at whom we can proudly say – yes, these are the products of the IFFK. Products in the sense they have been regular festival goers for the past many years, who have imbibed the idioms of the cinema of the world and are more than ready to risk everything, without caring for the ‘market.’
Different languageSajin Babu, Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, and Sudevan make films that speak a different language from what we are used to seeing in our films, and in which there is an unmistakable influence of the festival films.
Sajin’s Unto the Dusk and Sanal’s Oraalpokkam are included in the International Competition category of this year’s IFFK, and have been receiving a largely positive response from the crowd.
Unto the Dusk is a journey of self-discovery of an unnamed youth who quit the seminary to which his parents had forcibly sent him to. Man and nature comes face to face in this non-linear film, in which everything that meets the eye is not what it is.
Oraalpokkam is about a man’s journey to Kedarnath after floods ravaged Uttarakhand in 2012 in search of a woman with whom he had a five-year-long relationship. It stands closer to Sajin’s film in its theme, though the former is more experimental in its shunning of dialogues and background music.
Sudevan’s Crime No. 89 was the talking point of last year’s IFFK and won the NETPAC jury award as well as the State government’s award for the best film.
“I can safely say that I learned my cinema from the annual trips to watch the films at the IFFK. It has changed the way I approach cinema,” says Sajin, who draws inspiration from film-makers such as Carlos Reygadas, whose films have been screened here in the past.
Hopefully, we will get to see more products of the IFFK screening their films at the festival which fuelled the film-maker in them.
