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December 11, 2025

Silence (2025)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Spain, Review | Tags: , , , |
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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

Glancing back at life during the Covid-19 outbreak, the atmosphere of dread that reigned – the pervasive fear of infection, suspicion of the other, the heightened awareness of the fragility of civilization – feels a little quaint and remote. The swift response of modern medicine in curbing the pandemic has made a cataclysmic past seem somewhat abstract, even if the ravages of the virus were anything but.

Spanning three eras, writer-director Eduardo Casanova’s sprightly tragicomedy Silence contemplates not one but two epidemics from the vantage point of the present. The first act, set in a gothic mansion in the 14th century, centres on a family of vampires grappling with an existential threat: with the bubonic plague raging, there are fewer healthy people left to feed on. Worse, one of them, Veronica (Ana Polvorosa), has fallen in love with a human, to the great dismay of her orthodox sisters. Seeking to save him from her siblings’ wrath, Veronica reveals the truth about herself to her lover, only for her trust to be betrayed.

Cut to the 20th century. It’s the late 1980s, and the plague has given way to the AIDS epidemic. Broke, bedridden and as conservative as her sisters once were, Veronica is under the care of her daughter Malva (Lucía Díez), a bleeding heart who prefers synthetic blood to the real thing. Malva is in love with a human too, a drug addict to whom she isn’t confident enough to disclose her identity. But when the contagion outside comes home knocking, she is forced to set things straight.

Full of comic situations and lines, dramatic compositions, rapid-fire editing, and baroque musical passages, Silence is a buoyant, quick-footed work. It bends vampire lore to humorous ends, using it, for instance, to satirize generational differences and political correctness. Yet an unmistakeable tragic undercurrent courses through the film. In the figure of the vampire, Casanova locates both the shame of having to lead a double life and the anguish of having to outlive your loved ones.

More importantly, Silence processes the trauma that the queer community had to suffer during the AIDS epidemic, or what was dubbed the “gay plague” in an act of political weaponization. The prohibitions on love, the stigma of contamination and the self-imposed invisibility that Veronica and Malva endure mirror the experience of the protestors outside their apartment. “Silence = Death,” goes their slogan, questioning the omerta that reigns around the subject of HIV.

Looking back from a more humane world in 2030, the closing stretches of the film evoke at once a sorrow for those who succumbed to AIDS and a relief at the normalization of the disease, which has ceased to be the death warrant that it once was. As Malva and her lover exchange bodily fluids in passionate embrace, Silence becomes as much a celebration of this freedom from mortal fear as the inescapable sensuality of cinema itself.

 

December 6, 2025

The Bride (2024)

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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

Strolling home through the countryside, insouciant teenager Eva plays mock bride, gathering white flowers to adorn her billowing hair. Her aunt warns her about the danger that lies buried in these parts. “Keep playing in those bushes, and you’ll say bye to those legs,” she cautions. In a few moments, Eva’s life will indeed turn upside down, but these landmines, remnants of the recent civil war in Rwanda, won’t have been the cause.

After her aunt walks ahead, Eva’s dreamy idyll is interrupted by a group of young men who whisk her away. Eva, now a kidnapped bride, finds herself in a suburban house, married to a functionary named Silas. If the casualness with which Eva loses her freedom is shocking, it pales in comparison to what follows. Deferring to tradition, Eva’s relatives advise her to accept her fate, which entails not just a psychological adjustment to her new situation, but also painful acts of forced sexual maturity.

Eva spends her days in silent protest, yielding to Silas physically but without an iota of emotional involvement. However, she finds solace in the company of Silas’s female cousin, residing in the same house, who informs Eva of the unfathomable trauma their family had to endure during the Civil War.

Bonding over a shared history of deprivation, the two women forge an empowering dynamic that oscillates between the maternal and the sisterly. As Silas’ cousin, Aline Amike cuts a wise, world-weary figure who navigates this male-centric world with a mix of resignation and caution. Sandra Umulisa’s Eva is the image of innocence defiled, her residual girlishness exorcised in agonising routines of precocious conjugality. Together, the women engage in nourishing conversations and rituals of mutual care, carving out a space of healing from the violent strictures of family life.

The premise of The Bride is the stuff of high melodrama, but in her assured debut feature, director Myriam U. Birara adopts a measured, pared back approach that keeps the temperature of the material in check. There is no musical score here to amplify the emotions, only occasional acapella vocals of a haunting quality. The austerity of the sound design makes Eva’s helpless cries all the more harrowing.

To the same end, Birara develops her scenes entirely in static shots whose simplicity belie their exquisite colour and compositional balance. Shot by Bora Shingiro in soft natural light and an earthy palette of browns and whites, the film keeps us at a critical distance from Eva even as it makes us intimately familiar with her predicament.

 

December 1, 2025

Some Notes on the Current Situation (2025)

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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

What are conscientious artists to do, especially those dependent on state support for their work, when their country is waging a lopsided, genocidal war? Challenging the state, if it is possible at all, could invite reprisals. Dramatizing one’s personal anxieties risks producing narcissistic exercises in self-flagellation. Trying to find nuance might amount to little more than well-intentioned handwringing, while dodging the political altogether would smack of cynicism.

In Some Notes on the Current Situation, Israeli filmmaker Eran Kolirin gestures at one possible way out of this impasse, crafting a work where politics exists as a substructure, as a kind of collective unconscious that rises to the surface in all its nastiness every now and then. Bearing the subtitle “a film set before World War 3”, Kolirin’s 79-minute feature is divided into half-a-dozen loosely connected chapters, several of them set in nondescript countryside, devoid of all signs of the ongoing war. In fact, if not for its title, one could hardly say that the film deals with “the current situation” at all.

Kolirin, though, is no stranger to tackling politics head-on. His last feature, Let It Be Morning (2021), was an Arabic-language adaptation of Palestinian author Sayed Kashua’s Hebrew-language novel of the same name. It featured an all-Palestinian cast that boycotted, with Kolirin’s approval, the Cannes premiere of the film in protest against what they perceived as the Israeli state’s appropriation of their work. Like Morning, Notes is backed by the Israel Film Fund, but it’s a much smaller project with a cast of Jewish actors donning multiple roles.

Each chapter of Notes is something of an absurdist sketch, centring on rituals or interactions that defy rational explanation. In the film’s overture, for instance, a woman pushes against a concrete building with all her might, in the zealous belief that it is collapsing. She demands a passerby to lend her a hand. The man is confused, but obliges nonetheless. With the help of two others, they manage to prevent the impending catastrophe and, in the process, restore colour to their monochrome world. What begins as an individual delusion snowballs into a collective psychosis.

In another segment, a couple drives endlessly around the desert, their delivery truck loaded with snow, looking for the set of Theo Angelopoulos’ new movie. It turns out that the pair are time travellers from the past who have teleported themselves to a country they don’t recognize anymore. Elsewhere in the film, a sadistic military drill becomes the occasion for a return of the repressed.

This mosaic of humorously bizarre vignettes, a little reminiscent of the work of Roy Andersson, doesn’t yield easily to interpretation. The pleasure, on the contrary, is in their thought-provoking elusiveness. In the film’s Coen brothers-like coda, an elderly rabbi encounters a wayward husband and tells him the tale of a young Jewish scholar who meets his Inuit fiancée’s family. Suffice to say, the story ends with broken teeth and a tear-filled feast.

What moral lesson the husband, or we, are to draw from this outlandish parable is not immediately clear. But the inchoate, oppressive feeling of meaninglessness that it leaves behind is undeniable. Faced with film’s many Kafkaesque situations, we find ourselves in a state of fugue, just like the characters. Coursing through Notes is a strong sense of confusion and dislocation, the sentiment of finding oneself profoundly out of step with the logic of the world. In that, the film is perhaps entirely emblematic of “the current situation”.

 

November 26, 2025

Nova ’78 (2025)

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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

 

In December 1978, the Entermedia Theatre in East Village, Manhattan, was host to a three-day celebration of writer William S. Burroughs and his vision of the space age. Titled Nova Convention, the event brought together a range of avant-garde artists and thinkers who responded to Burroughs’ work through readings, conversations and performances. The then-64-year-old writer was a central presence himself, dressed in grey suit and a green fedora hat, reciting various unpublished pieces with his distinctive nasal twang.

A student at the New York University, Howard Brookner filmed the convention as part of his ongoing documentation of Burroughs’ life. Much of this material remained unseen until 2012, when Brookner’s archive was rediscovered in Europe and the USA, and subsequently restored through the efforts of his nephew, the filmmaker Aaron Brookner. In Nova ’78, the younger Brookner and co-director Rodrigo Areias offer a kaleidoscopic reconstruction of the event, liberally mixing on-stage performances with intimate behind-the-scenes footage, interviews with friends and other everyday vignettes.

Each number is emblematic of the freewheeling nature of the convention: Philip Glass producing hypnotic loops on a synthesizer, Merce Cunningham dancing to a baritone vocal piece by John Cage, Patti Smith offering to reimburse disappointed viewers before shredding her guitar, Frank Zappa reading the ‘talking asshole’’ bit from Naked Lunch (1959), or Laurie Anderson performing her song “From the Air”, assisted by Bobby Bielecki’s electronic effects.

Armed with a zoom lens, Brookner’s nimble camera floats around the artists and the audience, now capturing Burroughs lost in thought, now filming street scenes around the theatre. Inspired by the writer’s style, Nova ’78 juxtaposes starkly disparate material, such that actual poetry often rubs shoulders with poetry of a more mundane kind, one that grasps life in motion. Emerging from the film is an image of Burroughs as a fiercely independent, politically committed figure, opposed to every stripe of fundamentalism and authoritarian control.

Above all, Nova ’78 provides a precious glimpse into a creative community untouched by the logic of technocracy and corporatization. The convention isn’t any ‘gig’, and the artists and thinkers gathered here register as real individuals with eccentricities, not self-styled brands in thrall to showbiz mandates. The ease and spontaneity with which they participate in the event, and the unaffected warmth and respect with which they speak of Burroughs, attest to a high degree of personal integrity as well as a sense of genuine camaraderie. In that, Nova ’78 truly feels like a time machine.

 

November 21, 2025

The New Man (2023)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Belgium, Cinema of Cape Verde, Review | Tags: , , , |
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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

Time seems to stand still in the village of Ribeira Funda, tucked between the boundless ocean and the majestic mountains on the island of São Nicolau in Cape Verde. The moss-laden rocks, dilapidated stone houses, jagged pathways that comprise its expressionistic scenery appear to have existed since time immemorial.

Haunting this eternal landscape is old man Quirino, at once a king and a castaway, who leads a self-sufficient life in one of these houses, with a rooster for company. Signs of history soon surface — a radio bringing news from elsewhere, batteries, razor blades, cigarettes — cutting down this mythical figure to human scale. On the voiceover, Quirino recounts his memory of Ribeira Funda, once a thriving agricultural land, now drought-stricken and deserted.

The old man, we learn, has continued to live in this ghost village decades after its original inhabitants abandoned it for greener pastures. But now his faculties are failing him, and he must prepare for the great voyage beyond.

In his second feature The New Man, Carlos Yuri Ceuninck adeptly blends historical fact, lived experience and personal memory, crafting an ambitious, contemplative work that ventures beyond simple documentary portraiture. Part a sociological sketch, part a philosophical parable, Ceuninck’s film interweaves intimate observational vignettes, breathtaking landscape photography and a polyphonic voiceover in a way that both explains its subject and endows him with an irreducible mystery.

The New Man stands in interesting conversation with Wang Bing’s Man with No Name (2010), another absorbing record of a recluse at the edge of civilization. But where Wang remains a strict chronicler of the present, Ceuninck introduces what seem like visions from the past and the hereafter. Unfolding on a metaphysical stage lit by the celestial bodies and the scored to the churning seas, The New Man seamlessly melds myth, dreams and reality, illustrating that even a single, unremarkable life embodies the drama of the cosmos.

Ceuninck keeps pace with Querino’s quotidian rhythms, developing his film in long shots with little dramatic action, relieved regularly by glimpses of young boys playing, dancing or working the fields. Are these images from Querino’s own youth? Or are they part of the many legends that surround the village?

Querino’s sense of self is evidently bound to his memories of growing up in Ribeira Funda, but we also perceive that the land has an identity only insofar as its inhabitants bestow it with meaning. “There were many storytellers here,” Querino laments, “but death came, and it spared nothing and no one.” The New Man thus registers as an elegy, not for the man or his land, but for the intangible ties that bind them together. Death is on Querino’s mind as he too prepares to leave the village, but something far more significant will have died before his mortal end.

 

November 16, 2025

Judas’ Gospel (2025)

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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

“My whole trouble was that at no point was I able to lose my administrative and critical faculties,” remarks Judas in Paul Claudel’s short story The Death of Judas (1933). Claudel’s bracingly revisionist account makes a case for the twelfth apostle, recasting him as a sardonic, inquiring man who saw through the intellectual obfuscations of the miracles and the cowardice of his fellow disciples. This Judas celebrates his philosophical freedom even in death, suspended from a tree, unbound by the constraints of the cross that consumed his master.

Taking over the baton from Claudel, writer-director Giulio Base gives the devil its due in Judas’ Gospel, fully humanizing the treacherous figure and dramatizing his tussle with reason and faith. In Base’s retelling, born under a cursed star, Judas endures a harrowing childhood in a brothel. Wielding a bloody dagger, he rises to power and fortune, only to give it all away when Jesus (Vincenzo Galluzzo) summons him. Wise in the ways of the world, Judas is moved not so much by the Prophet’s supposed miracles, but by His simplicity and capacity for grace.

Base presents Jesus as a radical egalitarian, a proto-hippie whose following comprises men and women alike, without authority or hierarchy. With a forgiving smile, He condones the libertine goings-on in the group, which He leads from place to place over three years. In a subversion of the injunction against idolatry, Jesus is visible, front and centre, throughout the film, anchoring the image with His radiant presence. Even so, we don’t hear His voice except at choice moments, as when He beckons Judas or eulogizes Joseph at his funeral.

Judas, on the other hand, is simply a cloaked figure whose face never once shown to us. Yet it is his lucid, layered monologue that propels the narrative. Drawing us into an entirely subjective space, this voiceover (delivered by the gravel baritone of Giancarlo Giannini) accompanies us through the maze of Judas’ mind, his confusions about Jesus’ plans for him, his sense of superiority over his unlettered peers, and his messiah complex undone by his human failings.

As one’s image complements the other’s voice, Jesus and Judas become inextricable entities bound by prophesy. “Everything in the world exists thanks to its opposite,” Judas notes, implying that his treachery and Jesus’ ascension are mandates of the same divine will. Judas’ labyrinthine reasoning brings him to the conclusion that he was the only apostle faithful enough to carry out the betrayal, yet he succumbs to human logic at the moment of Crucifixion. Thematically and formally thought-provoking, Base’s film unveils Judas in all his fascinating contradictions. Ecce homo.

 

November 11, 2025

Keep Quiet (2025)

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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

“We are all squatters here, Toto”, quips officer Teddy Sharpe (Lou Diamond Phillips) to his rookie beat partner Sandra Scala (Dana Namerode). A half-Filipino working for the tribal police in Thunderstone indigenous reservation, Teddy is an ethnic outsider. But as someone who has grown up among the Native Indian community, he is intimately familiar with the ways of the reservation, now under the sway of drug cartels and warring gangs. “We have our laws and punishment, the streets have theirs”, goes another of Teddy’s nuggets to Sandra.

In Keep Quiet, Vincent Grashaw (Bang Bang, Locarno Film Festival 2024) offers a gritty, long–fused crime drama that puts the conventions of the genre at the service of a complex sociological reality. The reservation, in Zach Montague’s close-grained screenplay, is host to competing moral codes and regimes of authority: indigenous gangs who fashion themselves as a brotherhood above American law, the district police who only view them as anti-social elements to be clamped down, and the tribal police who perform an interstitial peacekeeping role.

At the centre of this vortex is Teddy, who uses his official power to curb delinquency in the reservation, but who is also mindful of the larger needs of the community. Having possibly wronged the community in the past, he is desperate to keep children away from both the streets and the law. But when Richie (Elisha Pratt), a reckless ex-convict, returns to the reservation with vengeful motivations, Teddy’s hopes of stemming the cycle of crime and violence are severely tested.

Shot by Brandon Waddell with an acute feeling for shadows, Keep Quiet offers a shining example of lean, no-frills genre filmmaking: invisible craft deployed to draw us into a believable, realistic world. Despite the richly detailed backstories to the characters, Grashaw succeeds in imparting immediacy and momentum to the narrative, never allowing the film to wallow in psychology. In that, he is aided by convincing performers such as Namerode and Pratt, who bring to life, with admirable economy, individuals fighting their own demons.

But the beating heart of the film is Phillips, who distils classical Hollywood models of middle-aged masculinity into Teddy: wise, sardonic, measured in action and word, with occasional touches of irascibility that only reveals an impatience with empty niceties. His moral sense is derived from a spontaneous, practical intelligence rather than theory or self-analysis. Yet he can be lucid when necessary, evoking a knotty, painful past with razor-sharp clarity and concision. Phillip’s Teddy is John Wayne and James Stewart rolled into one.

 

November 6, 2025

Ancestral Visions of the Future (2025)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Lesotho, Review | Tags: , , , |
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[An edited version of the following text was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine.]

It only takes a few seconds into Ancestral Visions of the Future to perceive that it is a markedly different work from Lemohang Mosese’s two breakout features from 2019: the epistolary essay Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You. and the community portrait This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection. To be sure, there is a remarkable continuity of thematic concerns across the three films by this Lesotho-born, Berlin-based artist, chiefly the fraught political and religious history of his home country, its spiritual amnesia and its desolate present mired in crime and violence.

But while Mosese’s earlier outings were framed through designated points of view — an unnamed letter writer in Mother and a diegetic storyteller in Resurrection — the new work is direct in its address and features a first-person voiceover by the filmmaker himself. Dense and florid, this voiceover lends the film the texture of a highly stylised poetic memoir. We learn, for instance, that Mosese’s mother always fought for a better life, dreaming of a comfortable home for her children and “stubbornly refusing to greet the hand of permanence”.

Yet Visions ventures beyond the confessional mode, unfurling alternatingly as a personal essay about the filmmaker’s native country and as a fragmentary fiction involving symbolic characters. Prominent among these is Sobo (Sobo Bernard), a healer-puppeteer who preserves the nation’s pre-colonial consciousness, and Manthabiseng (Siphiwe Nzima), a wandering woman who stands up to the ominous gangland cars that zip through the streets and leave bloodshed in their wake. Through these characters, Mosese constructs a layered assessment of his homeland, marked both by an appreciation for its bygone splendours and a profound disillusionment with its current-day perversions.

This ambivalence is echoed by Mosese’s own feelings as an artist in exile, someone whose work revolves around questions of memory and identity, yet whose own identity remains in flux. Steering clear of nostalgia, Visions refuses to separate fond recollections of the past from their material reality. At one point, for example, Mosese speaks of falling in love as a child with cinema in a hall that also reeked of human waste.

Evocative of the words in the voiceover, but never merely illustrative, the imagery of Visions weaves together impressionistic documentary footage with surreal, Sergei Parajanov-like tableaux. The film’s slightly oblique visual organisation expands the oral descriptions while also opening up secondary associations between sound and image. The resulting work hovers entrancingly between the familiar and the strange, reality and myth, fact and metaphor.

 

May 12, 2025

Showcase: The Light for the Rest of the Walk (Naresh Hegde Dodmari, 2024)

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Curator's Corner | Tags: , , , , , |
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[Part of Curator’s Corner, a section dedicated to showcasing work of emerging and marginal filmmakers. See here for details.]

A few days ago, I watched the Malayalam classic Irakal (1985). K.G. George’s dark and disturbing picture of youthful anomie finding outlet in sadistic violence. Irakal locates the root of its protagonist Baby’s malaise in his environment, namely his feudal, power-hungry household of landgrabbers, liquor barons and assorted self-seekers. The family in George’s film is a hotbed of pragmatic evil, Baby being simply its Platonic ideal. A new independent Kannada film by Naresh Hegde Dodmari, Tingl Belku (The Light for the Rest of the Walk), crafts a counter-portrait of sorts, offering a gentle domestic drama where the family is a source of support and salvation for a sensitive young man losing his bearings in life.

A poet who grew up in Honnavara and Yellapura in northwestern Karnataka (not far from the home of his near-namesake Natesh Hegde), Naresh Hegde wasn’t particularly drawn to films in his childhood. It was during his days as an engineering student in Bangalore – and later as an employee in Pune, where he had the chance to interact with film school students – that he became acquainted with international cinema through pirated DVDs and public screenings. Like a number of his self-taught peers, Hegde began his journey with short films made for YouTube before scraping together private equity to produce his first feature.

At the centre of Tingl Belku is Sandeep, an engineering student who returns home to Kumta, Uttara Kannada, for the summer vacation. Once an active poet, Sandeep has become, per his editor friend, sporadic and abstruse in his writing. He often takes off on his bike, spending his days alone away from home. Concerned with his aloofness, Sandeep’s parents seek the help of Harish, a local lawyer whom they are in talks with for marriage with their daughter. We gradually learn that Sandeep is under the influence of drugs and that he has been keeping away from college due to a police raid in the campus. As Harish tries to get to the bottom of things, Sandeep becomes increasingly incommunicative and introverted.

Tingl Belku stands out from the horde of cautionary drug dramas in the way it steers clear of the sensationalism inherent in the subject. There are no dramatizations here of withdrawal symptoms, no writhing in underlit corridors, no shocking glimpses of syringes or tie-off belts. Not once do we actually see Sandeep take drugs; we don’t even get to know what kind of drug it is. Part of this elision has to do with Hegde’s abstract treatment of the topic, which doesn’t really delve into the nitty-gritty of substance abuse or its sociological reality; the filmmaker is rather interested in the effects of addiction on the fabric of a rural middle-class family. But it is also the result of a consciously dialled-down approach to drama in which conflicts are defused as soon as they arise and characters are treated with a great deal of dignity.

Hegde depicts Sandeep’s affliction without condescension or pity. A dreamy-eyed poet of a philosophical bent, Sandeep views his drug habit as an exploration into expanded consciousness, a way to access realms of artistic inspiration inaccessible in waking life. Played without frills by Sharath Raysad, Sandeep shares little of the screen conventions of a discontented young man. Although his haze keeps him away from his family for long periods, he is well aware of the implications of his addiction on his near and dear. Not one to vocally rebel, Sandeep lays low and takes particular care not to upset the family cart, dutifully helping his father renovate the house and making sure that his situation doesn’t jeopardize his sister’s impending wedding.

These moral nuances extend to the secondary characters as well. Harish (Naresh Bhat), the prospective brother-in-law, fashions himself as a community leader, a problem solver who likes to make his presence felt everywhere he goes. But he is also a genuinely nice guy who goes out of his way to help Sandeep and his family. Above all, there is Sandeep’s soft-spoken father, Gopal (Venkatraman Gudaballi), the antithesis to the authoritarian patriarchs that dominate Indian cinema. Gopal, who defers to Harish in handling the situation, understands the limits to which he can probe his dodgy ward, the boundaries that he must respect with a son who now towers above his shoulders. More than anything, it is in these closely observed textures of everyday living that the film comes alive.

A beautiful sense of proportion and discretion marks all the relationships in the film: the palpable feeling that these are delicate bonds that it would be unwise to stress beyond a point. The film’s form reflects this reserve. In its leisurely pacing, soft naturalism and refusal of cable-TV hysteria, Tingl Belku may remind one of the telefilms that used to be broadcast on Doordarshan in the 1990s. Scenes are built elegantly, with no more than two (largely static) camera setups and attention paid to the flows of everyday interaction. Even when the style is uneven, caught between description of facts and an elaboration of the Sandeep’s interiority, there is a uniformity in tone that holds the film together.

Hegde imbues Tingl Belku with a heightened sense of place and time, with its scenes unfolding in strikingly varying landscapes that showcase the visual richness of the Uttara Kannada region: vistas of plains, woods, low hills, beaches, highways and fields all find prominent representation. Even if one doesn’t remember plot details, it would be hard to forget the stairways leading down to Sandeep’s house, or the one inside the living room connecting to the young man’s attic. This visual approach lends the film a subtly expressionistic quality where the settings reflect Sandeep’s fluctuating moods: the reclusive forest, the expansive sea, the melancholic horizon and so on.

An admirable debut feature of overarching benevolence, Tingl Belku had its world premiere in competition at the Rajasthan International Film Festival and is currently awaiting its international premiere.

 

Bio

Writer and director Nareshkumar Hegde (33, BE, MBA) was brought up in the Western Ghats and coastal region of Karnataka. He developed an interest in poetry and creative writing during his college days, which later transitioned to visual storytelling. Before completing his debut feature-length film Tingl Belku (The Light for the Rest of the Walk) in 2024, he made six short films which were selected and awarded in various short film festivals. Three of his short films, Mehnat, Bennigelliya Kannu and Parallel Lines, were finalists in three editions of the Bengaluru International Short Film Festival.

Contact

nareshandfilms@gmail.com | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram

Filmography

  • Feet & Patience (2012), 4 min., mobile phone
  • Three Boxes (2014), 12 min., digital
  • Feathers (2016), 20 min., digital
  • Mehnat (2017), 17 min., digital
  • Samantara Geregalu (Parallel Lines) (2018), 10 min., digital
  • Bennigelliya Kannu (Uncover) (2020), 23 min., digital
  • Tingl Belku (The Light for the Rest of the Walk) (2024), 108 min., digital.

Showcase

Teaser for The Light for the Rest of the Walk (2024)

 

April 30, 2025

Kumar Shahani + Ashish Avikunthak

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Filmmakers | Tags: , , , |
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[The following piece was published in Film Comment and written for the upcoming edition of Prismatic Ground.]

Prismatic Ground, the New York–based festival of experimental documentary and avant-garde film, is honoring Indian filmmakers Kumar Shahani and Ashish Avikunthak in its upcoming fifth edition. Shahani, who passed away in February 2024 at the age of 83, will be commemorated with a four-film retrospective, while Avikunthak will receive the festival’s Ground Glass Award for “outstanding contribution in the field of experimental media.” The two filmmakers have more in common than meets the eye.

Born in Larkana in current-day Pakistan and moving to Bombay with his family after the 1947 Partition, Shahani studied at the Film Institute of India in Pune, where he came under the tutelage of filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak (The Cloud-Capped Star, 1960) and Marxist historian D.D. Kosambi. Another influence encountered during his formative years was Robert Bresson, on whose A Gentle Woman (1969) Shahani assisted while he was a visiting student at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in Paris.

His first feature, Maya Darpan (1972), a formally rigorous portrait of a desolate woman wilting in a feudal mansion, was such a radical departure from the intellectually respectable idiom of neorealism that Satyajit Ray excoriated it for “threatening film language with extinction.” With state funding of niche, commercially unviable titles becoming increasingly difficult, Shahani wouldn’t be able to make another feature for 12 years, inaugurating a working life marked by unrealized projects and long gaps between films that he would fill with research, writing, and teaching. Across four decades, he would make no more than seven features, in addition to numerous shorts.

Like Shahani, though a generation younger, Avikunthak was also a child of Partition, born into a Hindu family of Punjabi origin that moved from Pakistan to Calcutta, in India, after 1947. Where Shahani experienced the churn of May 1968 during his time in Paris, Avikunthak credits his political consciousness to living through the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1992-93 in Bombay. His body of work, spanning eight features and seven shorts including Kalighat Fetish (1999) and Vakratunda Swaha (2010), demonstrates a dedicated engagement with Hindu iconography. Avikunthak’s invocation of vernacular gods, often visceral in its nudity and graphic violence, resists both the perversions of colonial puritanism and the contemporary Hindu Right’s consolidation of heterogeneous religious beliefs and practices in the subcontinent.

Shahani and, to a lesser extent, Avikunthak have both been associated with the Parallel Cinema movement in India. But their high-modernist practice stands far removed from the socially minded but formally conservative works that dominate the Parallel Cinema tradition. Unlike their peers, the two artists present their films primarily as intellectual constructs undergirded by strong philosophical frameworks: a theory of the epic form in the case of Shahani, Tantric spiritual thought for Avikunthak. Not for them the intuitive groping evoked by the word “experimental.”

Above all, Shahani’s and Avikunthak’s films find common ground in their rejection of the psychological realism that dominates classical narrative cinema. A Marxist by persuasion, Shahani framed his rejection in pointedly Brechtian terms: “Realism of detail,” he wrote, “can be a mask for eluding the real problems of society, its class relations.” Denying viewers cathartic immersion in a self-contained fictional world, Shahani instead invited them to arrive at a rational analysis of the relations depicted in his films. For Avikunthak, this rejection is a matter of religious ritual. Emptied of individual psychology, his human figures become metaphysical vehicles embedded in predetermined textual and gestural transactions.

Audiences at Prismatic Ground will have the chance to discover two singular artists whose works, despite their seeming hermeticism, stand in serious dialogue with the politics of their times.

 

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