Browsing All Posts filed under »Cinema: Kannada«

The contentious nature of the National Awards

April 14, 2018

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Read the full article on Film Companion, here: http://www.filmcompanion.in/the-contentious-nature-of-the-national-awards-baahubali-village-rockstars-sridevi/ Musings on the country’s most prestigious film awards – and this is not about whether X deserved to win over Y. Another year. Another set of arguments over the National Awards. For instance: Did Sridevi deserve Best Actress? Indeed, under normal circumstances, would her performance in […]

Readers Write In #35: Ageing With Films

March 5, 2018

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My father, who is the chief reason behind my ardent love for films, has stopped going to the theatres. My problem doesn’t end there. Once a passionate collector of movie DVDs, it is clearly evident that he has lost the interest in spending an evening at home watching his favourite film. It pains me when […]

Tamil cinema, English thoughts

January 25, 2018

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Read the full article on Film Companion, here: http://www.filmcompanion.in/southern-lights-tamil-cinema-english-thoughts/ In which I make a case that there needs to be more writing about non-Hindi cinema in English, if this cinema is to break through ghettos. I interviewed two authors at this year’s edition of the The Hindu’s Lit for Life. One of them was a […]

Happy new year

January 4, 2018

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Read the full article on Film Companion, here: http://www.filmcompanion.in/article/southern-lights-happy-new-year These are our pick of songs for the occasion from across south India. What are yours?? For the first column of 2018, I decided to do something simple: pick one song from Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam that celebrates the new year (or at least, contains […]

Interview: Anant Nag

December 26, 2017

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This is Anant Nag’s fiftieth year as an actor including five initially onstage in Mumbai. He talks about being abruptly removed from an ashram and later a Mutt in Karnataka and sent to Mumbai where he detested the curriculum. Anant recalls straying into Marathi theatre from where Satyadev Dubey introduced him to Shyam Benegal. He […]

“Dayavittu Gamanisi”… An intermittently affecting anthology about the journey that is life

October 21, 2017

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Spoilers ahead… Read the full review on Film Companion, here: http://www.filmcompanion.in/article/dayavittu-gamanisi-movie-review Rohit Padaki’s Dayavittu Gamanisi (Your Attention Please) opens with a train pulling into a station, and the last scene shows a train leaving the station. The film is an anthology of four shorts, whose chapter titles (Whirlpool, Existence, Illusion, Decision) hint at something bigger, […]

Film Companion – South

September 8, 2017

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So this is a plug for Film Companion South. Earlier, all videos from this part of the country were uploaded on the Film Companion YouTube page. Now, we’ve decided to have a separate page for the interviews in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam (have you seen the Prithviraj interview yet?). Do subscribe and spread the […]

“Ondu Motteya Kathe”… A gentle, winning comedy whose strains of sadness are smoothed over by the hilarity

July 6, 2017

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Spoilers ahead… Read the full review on Film Companion, here: http://www.filmcompanion.in/article/ondu-motteya-kathe-movie-review One reason for my interest in Ondu Motteya Kathe (The Story of a Bald Man) was autobiographical. Finally, a protagonist I can see in the mirror. The second was archaeological, for I spent quite a bit of time trying to excavate examples of films […]

Love on the run

July 6, 2017

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A flashback to moments from Duniya Soori’s 2015 Kannada thriller ‘Kendasampige’, about a rich-girl-poor-boy couple chased by corrupt cops. Read the full article on Film Companion, here: http://www.filmcompanion.in/article/southern-lights-kendasampige The first time we see Ravi and Gowri, they’re in a theatre, half watching the movie, half making out. This poor boy and rich girl are just […]

The Amateur’s Art #21- “Kivi Maathu” (Kannada, with English subs)

June 17, 2017

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See here for what this series is about. This short has been written and directed by Sandeep Kumar. Short Synopsis: Dayanand, a regular waiter at a bar is thrown into turmoil when he gets a call from his wife informing him that their daughter has eloped. The words of wisdom coming from a un-precedented corner […]

A very big man

June 15, 2017

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A flashback to moments from the 1972 Kannada drama ‘Vamsha Vruksha’, the story of a widow who remakes her life. Read the full article on Film Companion, here: https://www.filmcompanion.in/article/southern-lights-vamsha-vriksha Can a man be both traditional and modern? Can a Brahmin believe in rites and rituals and the Hindu way of life (which, sometimes, can be […]

The old man and the hill

April 27, 2017

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A flashback to moments from the 2002 Kannada drama ‘Dweepa’, where the construction of a dam threatens an ancient way of life. Read the full article on Film Companion, here: https://www.filmcompanion.in/article/southern-lights-the-old-man-and-the-hill Only the lower gates of the dam have been closed, and already the water levels have climbed to half the height of the hill […]

The seller of fish

March 30, 2017

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A deep dive into moments from the 2014 Kannada neo-noir drama ‘Ulidavaru Kandante’, which details the search for a man through the people who knew him. A journalist is in search of a story, a story about a man named Ritchie. One of the people she interviews, a cashew nut seller named Shailesha, tells her, […]

Wheatish complexion, average build

March 16, 2017

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A deep dive into moments from the 2016 Kannada drama ‘Godhi Banna Sadharna Mykattu’, which is about finding a father. And finding out about a father Shiva is one of those harried urban professionals who’s always on a call, but when his Alzheimer’s-afflicted father, Venkob Rao, goes missing, Shiva finds he has to let go […]

“Kirik Party”… A joyous, irresistible coming-of-age tale

January 8, 2017

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Spoilers ahead… The Kannada hit, Kirik Party, is the latest entry in the genre we could call South India’s answer to the South Bombay movie. The vibe is similarly cool, the sensibility similarly young, the air similarly irreverent, but there’s one crucial difference. The feel is grounded, recognisably rooted. The kids in the South Bombay […]

“U Turn”… ​No ‘Lucia,’ but still a smart, engaging mystery

May 28, 2016

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Spoilers ahead… Pawan Kumar is the rare writer-director who does justice to the job descriptions on either side of the hyphen. U Turn, his follow-up to the buzzy and justly acclaimed Lucia, begins with a lovely scene, in an auto, between Rachana (Shraddha Srinath) and her mother. The scene is essentially to establish that the […]

Village people

May 28, 2016

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Thoughts on ‘Thithi’, a small film with big buzz and bigger ambitions. The burden of expectation can sometimes be too much for a small film. Raam Reddy’s Kannada directorial debut Thithi won last year’s National Award for Best Feature Film in Kannada, which seems just about right. When we think “National Award-winning film,” we think […]

Common men, uncommon stories

August 15, 2015

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On the eve of the release of ‘Manjhi – The Mountain Man’, Baradwaj Rangan traces the journey of our biopics, which are no longer just about larger-than-life achievers. It all began in 1959, when a landless Bihari from the Musahar community, a scheduled caste that traditionally made a living as rat catchers, decided to make […]

The natural

February 14, 2014

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Balu Mahendra, who died yesterday of cardiac arrest, was one of the handful of filmmakers who, in the 1970s, changed the face of Tamil cinema. He was also one of the handful who could be termed an auteur. Every film he made was distinctly his. Part of this was, of course, due to his roots […]

Lights, Camera, Conversation… “Stranger than fiction”

September 20, 2013

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An entertaining new Kannada film pushes the envelope even as it pays homage to the old way of doing things. An usher at a single-screen cinema hall (Nikhil, played by Sathish Neenasam) pops a pill and begins to dream that he is a film star (also named Nikhil, but let’s call him Nikhil-2 so we […]

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