Kerala 2008

"Postcards from Leningrad"

"Little Red Seeds"

The Festival. The audiences at the 13th International Film Festival of Kerala were abundant and upbeat — not just at the anodyne or revved-up films but also at some of the more forbidding ones. The culture of Kerala made itself felt in their enthusiasm, no less than in the astonishing classical-dance performance that was a highlight of the closing ceremony. For me, the festival will remain unforgettable as an opportunity to work with the ten students in the press mentorship program who, as aspiring film critics and journalists, were kept busy providing daily coverage throughout the festival. May their passion for cinema be sustained and their opportunities to write enlarged.
    The IFFK Competition offered a strong slate of 14 films from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Our jury gave its prize to Mariana Rondón's inventive and diverting Postcards from Leningrad. Two competition entries that had won FIPRESCI awards at previous festivals, Huseyin Karabey's My Marlon and Brando and Enrique Rivero's Parque Via, were named by the IFFK's competition jury as the Best Debut Film and the Best Film, respectively. (That jury also recognized Mariana Rondón as Best Director.) Other interesting films included Girish Kasaravalli's masterly Gulabi Talkies, Laurent Salgues' handsome Dreams of Dust, Nan T. Achnas's stately, discreet The Photograph, Abolfazl Jalili's enigmatic Hafez, and Amor Hakkar's engaging The Yellow House. (After reflection, I believe that this last film — which recounts in a straightforward manner an Algerian villager's efforts to retrieve his son's corpse and play the young man's videotaped last message for his grief-shattered mother — is intentionally rather than unintentionally absurdist.)
    The Malayalam Cinema Today selection was disappointing. In a short essay published in the festival catalog, K. P. Jayakumar notes that Malayalam cinema is in the midst of a crisis brought on by globalization and by the influence of the Hollywood, Tamil, and Hindi film industries on the tastes of the local audience. Instead of following the path of other regional-language cinemas by projecting a valid representation of local identity, Malayalam cinema has so far settled for weakly imitative forms, according to Jayakumar. On the whole, the films in this section bore out this assessment. Even an above-average entry, veteran director T. V. Chandran's oddly titled Beyond the Wail (Vilaapangalkkappuram), about a Muslim woman who flees from Gujarat to Kerala after the 2002 riots in her home state, suffers from the heavily obvious, over-slick style that dogs, more disastrously, Jayaraj's Gulmohar and Madhupal's Thalappavu (which both deal with the Naxalite struggles for land reforms in Kerala in the 1970s). M. Mohanan's As the Story Unfolds... (Kadhaparayumpol) has some success with its light-comic approach to the problems of rural tradesmen (in particular, a poor village barber) in the face of modernization, but the film wastes its promise in torrents of crude sentimentality. Let's hope that the best film in the section, Anjali Menon's Lucky Red Seeds (Manjadikkuru), points to a larger renewal of Malayalam cinema and is not merely an isolated triumph by a gifted and intelligent first-time filmmaker.   (Chris Fujiwara)

International Film Festival of Kerala, December 12-19, 2008, www.keralafilm.com
FIPRESCI Prizes: Postcards from Leningrad by Mariana Rondón (Venezuela) and Little Red Seeds by Anjali Menon (India). Details

Reports

The Double Look. Chris Fujiwara reviews Lucky Red Seeds, Indian director Anjali Menon's flashback to the mid-70s in rural Kerala: "There is a connection between childhood and cinema, which first-time director Anjali Menon exploits beautifully".
Depicting Women in Conflict Situations. Manoj Barpujari reviews Postcards from Leningrad by Mariana Rondón (Venezuela), and talks about other films based on stories of women protagonists against the backdrop of contemporary violence and uncertainty.
Indian Independent Cinema and Regional Identity. The festival featured sixteen new Indian regional productions. This gave the rare opportunity to discover the immensely rich diversity of regional cinematography of the Indian subcontinent. Barbara Lorey reports.

Kerala Press Mentorship Program

The festival has kicked off a new Press Mentorship program in association with FIPRESCI. The program gives aspiring Indian film critics and journalists two important opportunities. One is the chance to gain exposure to world cinema through accreditation at the festival. The other is the chance to benefit from the guidance of four international professional film critics and journalists — Chris Fujiwara, Barbara Lorey, Pradip Biswas, and Dr. C. S. Venkiteswaran — while taking part in a program designed to simulate the actual working conditions of journalists covering a festival.
    Each day of the festival, which lasts until December 19, FIPRESCI and the IFFK will publish the ten young writers' articles on their web sites. The articles will include film reviews, news reports, interviews, and feature stories. Some of these texts will also be featured in the festival's daily print bulletin.

Day 01. The festival chose the ten aspiring writers from among a larger pool of applicants on the basis of responses to the question, "Why do you like to write about cinema?" Here are their responses
Day 02. The Opening. Films: Firaaq (India), Laila's Birthday (Israel), Ramchand Pakistani (Pakistan). Retro: Hiroshima mon amour (France). Texts
Day 03. On Hafez (Iran), Juju Factory (Congo), Castles in the Air (India), Shyam Benegal's political satire Welcome to Sajjanpur (India). Texts
Day 04. Films: Three Monkeys (Turkey), Music Box (Iran), Dreams of Dust (Burkina Faso), The Photograph (Indonesia), The Yellow House (Algeria). Interview: Huseyin Karabey (Turkey). Report: The Federation of Film Societies. Texts
Day 05. Two reviews of Tokyo Sonata (Japan). More films: Adventurers (Hungary), Maradona (Kusturica), Flowers in the Sky (Sri Lanka). Retro: Fernando Birri's The Flooded-Out. Exhibition: The History of Malayalam Cinema. Texts
Day 06. Films: Burn After Reading (the Coens), The Imprints (India), Machan (Sri Lanka), Two-Legged Horse (Iran). Retro: The Law (Idrissa Ouedraogo). Interviews: Joseph Pulinthanath, PK Nair, Uberto Pasolini, Bina Venugopal. Texts

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