Wednesday, October 10, 2007

BFI on Amma Ariyan


The docu-poetic film about the journey of a group of young men through Kerala, all somehow related to an unidentified corpse, also becomes a journey through the histories of the socioscapes depicted. As the film unfolds in the form of a letter from a son to his mother, Abraham relentlessly uses bodies and landscapes as media through whom a discourse on the search for the cinematic-political is visualised. Dislocations of points-of-view are effected through imaginative camerawork, a highly uneven relationship between image and soundtrack montage and multiple performance styles. Scenes denoting the present and the past resonate ambiguously against each other and are frequently interspersed with quasi-documentary footage. A highly complex commentary on the history of the relationships between the personal, the social and the political as evidenced from the state's radical political past, the film was made entirely on the basis of public funds backed by the state film corporation.

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