Raam Reddy: ‘Film itself is a character’

My interview with the filmmaker Raam Reddy, as published in Mint Lounge on 3 Mar 2024.

Raam Reddy on his second feature, ‘The Fable’, and why the setting always comes early in his outline and feeds into everything.

Raam Reddy was 26 when his directorial debut Thithi (Funeral) premiered at the 2015 Locarno Film Festival, winning several awards on the international film festival circuit and the national award for Best Kannada Film in 2016. A marvellously deadpan tragicomedy about three generations of men responding to the death of a patriarch, Thithi was set in co-writer Ere Gowda’s village of Nodekopplu in Karnataka’s Mandya district.

Now 34, Reddy has made a second feature strikingly different in terms of cast, language, setting and tone. The Fable features Mumbai-based actors like Manoj Bajpayee, Deepak Dobriyal and Tilottama Shome, has dialogues in English and Hindi, is shot on 16mm, and unfolds in the shadowy glades of a fruit orchard in Uttarakhand. Set in 1989, it’s about an English-speaking business family not dissimilar to Reddy’s own—except that the man of the house (Bajpayee) spends a lot of time surveying his surroundings, wearing a pair of wings. The Fable substitutes Thithi’s gentle philosophical realism with the surreal and mysterious, exploring the family’s transformation after fires begin to break out on their estate. 

Lounge spoke with Reddy at the recently concluded 74th Berlin International Film Festival, where The Fable had its world premiere. Edited excerpts:

The settings of both your films are very different: a chaotically busy Karnataka village and a vast, quiet Himalayan estate. What role does place play in inspiring your work?
A huge role. Place always comes early in my outline and feeds into absolutely everything. My novel It’s Raining In Maya (2011) is set in a fictitious town inspired by my years in Delhi University’s North Campus. I lived in Malkaganj. For Thithi, it was the village. Here it’s the mountains, because they have an inherent magic in the air.

In ‘Thithi’, there was a real village. But in ‘The Fable’...
It’s fictional.

So, was the germ of this film the setting?
Actually, it was genre. The magical elements I have experienced in very moving ways in literature, I wanted to translate them into cinema. Then the setting: I spent three months in the mountains. The narrative structure comes from what story the place wants me to tell. Thithi was very... humorous? This time I was excited by the challenge of holding attention through mystery.

‘The Fable’ combines a real world with the surreal. How did you decide what those magical elements would be?
I would love to clap on a pair of wings and fly. Or be able to communicate without words. I always wanted to be part of that heightened reality. It gets a little indulgent, but I wanted to abide a little in these dreams, in a very pure way.

Do your scripts start as novels?
My novels look more like films scripts: I think in cuts. But yes, this screenplay was quite literary. I used language to create moods that had to be executed in the audiovisual domain. Quite hard to do if you have a lot of specifics.

Talking of specifics: why fires?
When I was in the mountains for the first time, I went to fight a forest fire. And I like allowing life to guide my storytelling hand.

You mean, it’s like magic: the fire happening while you were there.
Exactly. Fire was also exciting at the narrative level: it’s the perfect crime (there’s no way to know where a spark fell in a pine forest) as well as the perfect capsule to see how an unknown accident affects a social ecosystem. Fire also signifies many things, like regeneration. Destruction is not always negative. It also brings forth the new.

You have two songs, which seem crucial to the mood.
Not just mood, but meaning. The lyrics move me to tears each time, even in the edit room. Shivoham says you are not your body, or your mind: you are pure consciousness. This is the deepest part of our philosophy and I connect with it deeply. As does the family. It takes them into a spontaneous meditation. The purity of that space, from which the song comes, is why the family were worthy of this story. Naiharwa is about reaching the land of the enlightened. Both have been sung by my sister-in-law (Hindola Aguvaveedi). She would sing these to us after she married my brother.

How much does the film draw on your own life?
I have spent time in a coffee estate, I have seen those relationships as a child and I wanted to question them. So the soul of the film is personal, it’s my voice as an artist. But the body—the north Indian setting, the narrative elements, those are my craft as a filmmaker. I almost don’t want to be over-familiar with the place. Like in Thithi—it wasn’t my village.

In ‘Thithi’ you worked largely with non-actors. Here you have well-known actors.
Unlike in Thithi, where we wrote roles based on real-life characters, here I wanted to write and then find actors who could inhabit those key roles, who could transform. But there are many non-actors: the villagers, the army men, the gardener, the maid. They served different purposes within this tapestry.

Was the combining of actors and non-actors ever a challenge?
These are the challenges I love. That dynamic was exciting to me: having a veteran like Manoj-ji do scenes with Ravi Bisht, who is a Pahadi villager, is talented but never acted before. Or Tilottama (Shome) going into the non-actor world and playing a villager. But mostly we had an actor schedule and a non-actor schedule.
I tried with this film to bring opposites together. So it is realistic but also magical; it is 16mm, 1980s in look and feel, but it’s also VFX-heavy. (The fires, but also a lot of the nature is VFX.)

Why did you want to shoot on film?
Multiple reasons. One, it was the medium in use in 1989. Making it look like it was shot then, that authenticity was exciting. I also believe in a kind of transference of consciousness in art; I think film carries our emotions in a tactile way, more potently than the digital medium. Film itself is a character, the grain dances from frame to frame. I do still photography on film, so that was the entry point.

Creating this visual world was a beautiful collaboration with debut cinematographer Sunil Borkar, and debut production designer Juhi Agarwal. I love working with first timers in key roles—it’s not like I am so far away from being one—because their visions are so uncoloured, coming straight from the hearts.

Would you speak a little about the film’s politics, and class in it?

First of course there’s the colonial hangover. And class has always fascinated me. It is a cross-sectional analysis of a plantation society. There is the family at the core. Then the manager who is loyal to the family but is a local himself, so he mediates between worlds. Then there are the villagers whose livelihoods are based on the estate by choice, or at least within the choices available to them. There is a loving relationship between Dev (Bajpayee) and his workers, but there is an obvious disparity. There is a shot in the film where the workers are walking home, under suspicion—and you cut to the family at a dinner party.That’s just how much of India is. And then there are the nomads: they surrender to nature, they don’t speak.

The nomads seem to represent a different sensibility from your real-world concern with class. They seem almost fictitious.
Totally, almost like elves. They had to stand apart. They are part of the questioning of our rights. Can we inhabit nature, filled with trees and creatures, without being persecuted?

Your shooting schedule was disrupted for two successive summers by the pandemic. What do you do as a filmmaker when something stops a creative process like that?
You stop, internally as well. I make one film at a time. But I am a compulsive creator. I’m into photography, music, philosophy, poetry, songs—not for an audience, yet.

Do you think of ‘The Fable’ as political allegory? 
It is part of the layers, but you can decide what you think is the core. As an artist, that’s exciting to me—to leave room for my art to be inhabited.

Trisha Gupta is a Delhi-based writer and critic, and professor of practice at the Jindal School of Journalism and Communication.

Best of 2016: Part II

My Mirror column:

The second part of my year-end list of my favourite Indian films from 2016.

Carrying on from last week's column: here are six more films that I particularly enjoyed last year.

In no particular order, they are:

6. Waiting – In Anu Menon's affecting hospital drama, two unlikely people are brought together by the shared frustration of having a loved one beyond their reach. Naseeruddin Shah is reliably good as Shiv, an ageing professor who is the epitome of softspoken rationality — except when he's not. But it is Kalki Koechlin as Tara who surprises. As a sharp young woman suddenly faced with the potential loss of the man she has just married, Tara's yo-yoing between anger, vulnerability and sassiness is at the film's heart. Shot in an upscale Kochi hospital that somehow lends itself to cinematographer Neha Parti Matiyani's clean lines and bright close-ups, Waiting serves up grief and angst without letting go of humour. (I particularly enjoyed the mild comic relief served up by Rajeev Ravindranathan as the too-helpful colleague).

7. Sairat – Among the frequenters of film festivals, there are still many who cannot but view the slow-mo set pieces and addictive songs of Nagraj Manjule's hugely successful film as somehow a betrayal of the hopes he sparked with his 2014 debut Fandry. But if Fandry's placing of its dreamy-eyed child hero in an unremittingly realist cinematic milieu earned it critical acclaim, Sairat's astute, sparkly retelling of the same tale —a cross-caste romance in a rural Maharashtra educational setting — won not just fame for its actors, huge profits and massive audiences, but an unimaginable level of exposure for both Marathi cinema and the film's difficult subject. Manjule gloriously subverts India's grim social reality with our love for filmi romance — and vice versa. A film not to be missed.

8. Chauthi Koot – Gurvinder Singh's arresting adaptation of two short stories by Waryam Singh Sandhu offers us a tense, sometimes sinister Punjab that's almost unrecognizable as the one regularly celebrated in Bollywood's song-filled sarson-da-sagas. But though the stories he adapts are set during the 1980s militancy and their central themes — gun-toting men intent on silencing a harmless dog, or train conductors unwilling to take people of a certain community on board — are certainly 'political', Singh's rendering of them is anything but heavy-handed. Trained under the late experimental filmmaker Mani Kaul, Singh is much less invested in plot or narrative resolution than he is in the atmospheric, painstaking exploration of a place and people — and of cinema itself. A film which will reward the attentive viewer.

9. Island City – A tonally ambitious film which pitches itself somewhere between sly humour and a pessimistic take on late capitalism, debut director Ruchika Oberoi's triptych of tales about people and machines can feel quite trippy at times. Each segment is anchored in a fine performance. In the first, Vinay Pathak puts in an eerily convincing turn as the obedient corporate slave sent unwittingly on a dangerous path. The second has Amruta Subhash walking a thin line between relief and guilt as a housewife whose oppressive husband's hospitalisation finally frees her to live her own life — and sublimate her desires in a fictional ideal man. The imagined ideal man reappears in the third segment, this time not via the television, but through letters received by Tannishtha Chatterjee's lonely worker. An occasional sliver of abruptness notwithstanding, Oberoi crafts a darkly acerbic comment on our increasingly alienated lives that's well worth watching.

10. Kapoor and Sons: The dysfunctional family is practically an indie staple in the West, but in Indian cinema it is still a rare enough occurrence to make Shakun Batra's film seem remarkable. While nowhere near as devastating as say, Kanu Behl's Titli (2015), Kapoor and Sons manages to take more risks with what it serves up as family foibles than similar recent films like Dil Dhadakne Do, Shandaar and Khoobsurat. Batra's ability to juggle the buried resentments and the goofy jokes is further buoyed by a truly superb ensemble cast: Rajat Kapoor and Ratna Pathak Shah outstripping the youngsters (Sidharth Malhotra, Fawad Khan and Alia Bhatt), and themselves being a little bit overtaken by the infectiously cheerful Rishi Kapoor as the family's indefatigable raunchy patriarch.

11. Thithi: A great deal of worldwide acclaim has come the way of this remarkable film, and all of it is justified. Set and shot in the very particular landscape of rural Karnataka, Raam Reddy and screenwriter Ere Gowda's delightful debut combines an observational documentary style with a fairly large involved set of characters (who are almost all played by non-actors from the region). Things may appear to be unfolding with all the natural ease of everyday life — but make no mistake, this is a carefully thought-through portrait of family and community, age and youth, freedom and responsibility, death and life. Don't let some imagined notion of rural Karnataka or a reluctance to engage with subtitles put you off it.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Jan 2017.

Dharamshala International Film Festival: Why it's an unmatched experience for cinephiles

My long-overdue piece on DIFF, whose 5th instalment was held in Nov 2016.

It should be easy to write about the Dharamshala International Film Festival. Started five years ago by the wonderfully matter-of-fact Ritu Sarin and the almost shy Tenzing Sonam (partners in life and documentary filmmaking, whose long-term connection to the Tibetan cause led them to settle in Dharamshala in 1996), DIFF is the sort of experience that leaves you pinching yourself. How could some people you've never even met have created the film festival of your dreams?

The remarkable thing about DIFF, though, is that its dreaminess is real. Sarin and Sonam, Tibet activists for as long as they have been filmmakers, aren't the sort to create some airy-fairy fantasy world. The location this year was the Tibetan Children's Village: a Dharamshala institution that began in 1960 with fifty-one children from a road construction camp and a rug borrowed from the Dalai Lama. The school campus, built by the labour of generations of TCV students, is a 15 minute drive up from McLeodganj's central square, and lends itself well to the festival's well-adjusted local-global vibe. The bigger screenings are held in the school auditorium, with the resonant names of houses — Songtsen, Trival, Trisong and Nyatri — emblazoned on the walls, and its cavernous cement depths oft invaded by freezing draughts that should give potential snuggling couples just the excuse they need.

The films, too, aren't just a list of the Biggest-Coolest-Latest that money can buy, as the bigger festivals are increasingly becoming. What we get instead is a perfectly curated mix of fiction and non-fiction, Indian and international, features and shorts, with a sense of each film being chosen for its own sake, with no kowtowing to 'themes' — and yet a clear political-personal sensibility at work.

The documentary, for instance, gets more play here than it might at a different festival of the same size: this year, for instance, there were as many as nine feature-length documentaries to 17 narrative features. And in keeping with the festival's non-divisive spirit, non-fiction isn't relegated to a separate section like fiction's less-cool sibling. It appears that just this small change in approach — not making a big hoo-ha about documentaries, but simply adding them to the mix in no-fuss fashion — is enough to produce avidly enthusiastic full houses for them. Two of the biggest crowdpleasers I watched at DIFF, in fact, were non-fiction: the British filmmaker Sean McAllister's powerfully personal engagement with a Syrian-Palestinian family (A Syrian Love Story, 2015) and the Iranian director Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami's documentary about a teenaged Afghan refugee becoming a internet rap sensation (Sonita, 2015).

The other thing to remember is that DIFF is a compact three-day festival, and the number of films is tiny in comparison with IFFI or MAMI or IFFK. I swiftly began to realise that scale is everything. Unlike larger film festivals, there are usually no more than two parallel screenings, with an occasional conversation competing for your attention. This makes it possible, at the end of each day, to feel as if you've actually shared a substantial chunk of experience with the young whippersnapper who's already screened at Venice and is invariably ahead of you in the bar queue, and with the lovely quirky American lady who mentions her knee replacement surgeries with enviable lightness, even as she matches you step for step down the stone staircase shortcut that connects one screening venue with another. This is it, then — the not-so-secret secret of community: smallness, sharing, and a resolute lack of hierarchy.

But what makes DIFF different, in the end, is not the superbly well-chosen films, the infectious warmth of apple-cheeked children running around in the winter sun, or even the lung- and mind-expanding air up in the mountains, where (as the terribly youthful director Raam Reddy put it so charmingly before the Opening Night screening of his film Thithi), “the soul feels close to your body”. What really creates the vibe of the festival is the people.

There is something particularly freeing about having people — whether new initiates or veteran filmwallahs — congregating all the way from Delhi and Kerala, Bombay and Pune and Bengaluru, to share cinema and conversation in a place which feels somehow unburdened by the weight of Culture with a capital C. There is a great deal of serious conversation, both political and artistic, but it is conducted in the generous spirit of bonhomie and constructive criticism. There are few 'big men' around, and if they are, they don't have the license here — or perhaps the yen — to throw their weight around. I wait warily when Saeed Mirza, whose films I have long admired, is encouraged to pontificate on the state of the nation. He holds forth (as is his wont, and as I remember him doing in a white kurta-pajama, sprawled on the Siri Fort lawns in a Delhi IFFI in the early 90s), but he sounds accurate, as if his own inner bullshit-detector is working better in the mountain air.

All successful film festivals are pilgrimages, and DIFF is no exception. Most vivid proof of this is provided by the veritable army of youthful volunteers who arrive year upon year, contributing their time and spending their own money to participate in the hectic yet orderly shramdaan that is essential to the festival's success. Some volunteers I met had no particular interest in cinema; several others were film-mad. Many of those I spoke to at some length shared a dilemma about the artistic life – can one ever make a living off it, or must one's art be honed independently of whatever what does to make a living?

For one young Malayali man I met, volunteering at DIFF was a way into understanding how to run a film festival someday: “I want to learn, how do you get 200 people to work for you for free?” he grinned. For another — also visiting from Kerala but not a volunteer — DIFF was his first film festival. Engineer by training and entrepreneur by instinct, he's already sorted out a small business; now he's immersing himself in cinema because he's writing scripts for Malayalam films.

The lovely thing that makes DIFF a community, perhaps, is that it isn't just the volunteers who're grappling with that question of independence. Whether by choice or by design, the festival seems to attract filmmakers and writers and artists who're striving to keep creative control of their work — while not being starved entirely of the oxygen of popularity.

Published in Firstpost, 26 Nov 2016.

Picture This -- Rinse and repeat

Yesterday's BLInk column: 

The experience of viewing a film a second time ought to be a tidier, more predictable, repeat of the first. After all, the film is the same, and ostensibly, so are you.

What happens when you watch a film for the second time? I don’t mean the sort of second watching that comes decades after the first — like when your mum finally decides she’s had enough of Arnab Goswami and Muqaddar Ka Sikandar is playing on the next channel. I mean something much more deliberate: returning to the theatre or sitting down with your laptop to watch a particular film, a few days or a few weeks or, at most, a few months after the first time you saw it.

Now when you’ve watched something once already, you think you know how you feel about it. You know what you liked about it and what you didn’t, where the actors seemed to be trying too hard and which scene played itself out too quickly. So one might imagine that the experience of viewing a film the second time will be a tidier, more predictable repeat of the first. After all, the film is the same and, ostensibly, so are you.

But think about it, and you know that the second time is likely to be different. And not just different, but unpredictably so. That scene which you thought you wanted to watch unfold forever the first time might now seem excruciating rather than deliciously condensed. The jokes you laughed at the first time may lose their punch: repetition often does that to humour. Additionally, the experience will depend at least partly on what you hope to achieve by the repetition. Sometimes we’re just blown away by the film, and it seems like a pleasurable idea to try and recreate the magic. Sometimes it’s cinematic complexity that creates the desire to return — meaning there was such a host of things going on in the film, visually or aurally or narratively, that a second watch seemed necessary to absorb them. Sometimes it’s just chance that brings the film back into your life — a friend who insists you watch it with them, or a public screening that lets you decide to watch it again.

A recent trip to McLeodganj to attend the utterly charming Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) was bookended for me by two such instances. The festival’s opening night involved a screening of Thithi, a Kannada film that I first saw in Delhi at a Siri Fort Auditorium screening of National Award winners early this summer, and that opened to a long and fairly successful run in cinemas across India soon after.

My memories of watching Thithi (and the notes I made at Siri Fort) were dominated by the characters. Like everyone else, I was most struck by the bearded, unkempt Gadappa (literally ‘beard-man’). But there were others who stayed with me: the bush-shirt-clad wheeler-dealer through whom Gadappa’s son wants to sell the family land, the gleeful excitement of Gadappa’s grandson Abhi as he successfully woos a striking shepherd girl who’s caught his eye.

The other thing that had stayed with me was a powerful sense of Raam Reddy’s chosen landscape: stretches of almost barren red earth, bumbling herds of sheep, groves of sugarcane whose overgrown greenness is beholden to an erratic irrigation pump.

This time around, I remained enchanted by Gadappa’s face and bearing — his memorable melding of a childish stubbornness and a wisdom that can only come from experience. And perhaps because I already knew what they were going to say, I could gaze uninterrupted at the faces of many others.

But otherwise it was like watching a different film. The visual seemed to recede into the background, and sound came to the fore. The funerary band that I had marked for their incongruously orange sashes, I now noted for the deliberate gaiety of their music: defying the lovely gravity of the faces around the pyre, perhaps defying death itself. There was the tinny congratulatory tone of the TV talk show, and the sulky silence of the blocked-out porn clip. I heard, as if for the first time, the mobile ringtones piercing the otherwise bucolic quiet of the village: songs of youth, anthems of the present. But suddenly, now, I heard more and more industrial sounds: the loud tractor on which Abhi and his friends go on their illegal logging expeditions, or the borrowed bike that makes him monarch of all he surveys, the dull whirring of the wood-cutting machines. But I also heard, with much greater clarity, a repeated exclamation: “Hou!” — its intonation differing from person to person and situation to situation. It is not a word I know, I have no wish to look it up — and yet, somehow, it felt absolutely central to Thithi’s conjuring of a landscape.

On the way back to Delhi after the festival, part of a crew of returning journalists, I found myself granted the unreturnable gift of the video coach. Ae Dil Hai Mushkil was to play, and greeted with a mix of delight and mock-despair. “Our last DIFF screening,” said someone. Ae Dil wasn’t a film I had intended to watch again. But there in the back of the Volvo, surrounded by new friends whose reactions I couldn’t predict and was utterly curious about, it became a different film. Or rather, as many films as there were faces to watch.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, 19th Nov 2016.

The World Is What It Is

My Mirror column:

An internationally acclaimed Kannada film offers a funny, sad, insightful take on an India we don't often see on screen.

The most colourful character in Thithi is dead within the first ten minutes of the film. When we meet Century Gowda, thus anointed for managing to live that many years upon this earth, he seems like that familiar village fixture: a gap-toothed old man, capable of nothing except sitting on his haunches and watching the world go by. But Century Gowda is not like most people at his stage of life. Age has not withered him, nor custom staled the infinite variety of taunts that flow from his ancient tongue. "You kids neither study nor graze cattle," he berates a passing posse of uniformed schoolchildren. "No men at home to graze the buffalo?" he jeers at a woman trying to steer the lumbering beasts past him. A hapless looking fellow who scurries by dressed in an incongruous black suit gets a more personalised insult: "Has your wife left you yet?" he calls out. 

But then his nonstop activity comes abruptly to a close. The film pauses for an instant, marking the moment with a shift that is both visual and perceptual. The human world carries on — it is the animals who notice. The camera suddenly gives them to us in close-up — the rooster crowing, the cow mooing, the goat bleating, as if to announce they're alive and well, and that crumpled heap on the ground is not. 

It takes barely a minute, though, to return us to a human perspective. A crowd gathers, the old man's grandson is called, and soon enough an astrologer has been sought out to offer advice on what must be done. Thithi is the word for that funereal feast he ordains. Ere Gowda and Raam Reddy take the ritual markers with which we seek to make our lives intelligible, and craft around them a film that is about the unmarked, everyday business of living. The marking of death is part of the carrying-on of life. 

Yet Thithi is not the sort of film that is about only one thing. If it outlines the generational scaffolding upon which life in the village still stands, it also shows us the cracks that individuals can create in that structure. Century's grandson Thamanna may cleave to the rules of community, but his father Gadappa — Century's son — has long refused to abide by them. 

Played by Ere Gowda's real-life uncle Chennagowda, a wiry man with a shock of wild white hair and a thoughtful gleam in his eye, Gadappa is perhaps the film's most affecting character. We start off being amused, perhaps even a little shocked by his response to the death of his father. "No big deal," he says, striding off into the fields with his usual quarter of local liquor. As Thamanna's harried existence — negotiating with his wife, disciplining his youthful son, running around for a motor mechanic to get the water back into his fields — is juxtaposed with Gadappa's free-floating, alcohol-fuelled wanderings, one wonders if the film is setting up the householder against the ascetic. Is social obligation the glue that keeps things from falling apart, or that which unnecessarily binds us? Is Gadappa the irresponsible wastrel his son treats him as, or does his lack of worldliness makes him a model worth emulating? Even much later in the film, when his 'unfeeling'-ness is partially explained, Gadappa retains an intriguing air. 

Reddy manages to combine an observational documentary style with an almost indulgent affection for every character he places on screen. Women remain largely tangential, though watch out for the marvelous Kamalakka, who accosts a drunken customer with a threat appropriate for anyone you've ever wanted to shake by the collar: "I'll pass your life through a strainer!" Yet for all its pleasurable meandering, Thithi is not plotless. Its seemingly unplanned threads do in fact come together in the end — just not in the dramatic pitch we have been schooled to expect from cinematic resolutions. 

My favourite of these narrative threads involves Gadappa's spontaneous joining-up with a group of sheep-herders. Their surprised but ready acceptance of the old man reminded me a little of another old man who finds himself taken into a nomadic community, albeit under starkly different circumstances: the Marathi film Astu, in which Amruta Subhash's Telugu-speaking nomad finds herself sheltering an aged, confused Mohan Agashe. On an altogether different plane, Chennagowda's adamant refusal to stay in one place made me think of the immortal David Gulpili in Rolf de Heer's devastating Charlie's Country. Of course, Gadappa is rebelling against his own community; while Gulpili's Charlie is rebelling against a whole modern civilisation that has swallowed up the old aboriginal way of life. But like Gulpili, Chennagowda has a twinkling, laconic way of declaring his intentions, and a dogged pursuit of life on his own terms. He may have always wanted to wander, but he will not do so at anyone else's behest. These are spirited old men laying claim to the lands of their forefathers — but doing so in a way that rejects accumulation. 

Thithi is a remarkable, unusual film. Not just because it gives us a set of memorable characters (all non-actors) and etches in almost ethnographic fashion a rural Karnataka milieu, but because it so beautifully balances the event with the non-event, the extraordinary with the ordinary, the gently comic with the deeply sorrowful. A little like life.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 5th June 2016.