There is not even the faintest tinge of sarcasm in the visual language used in ‘Thattumporathappan’. The events that unfold on the attic of a home in rural Palakkad are merely watched by the mute camera lens. And yet, the short film that won Sudevan, a self-taught film-maker, rave reviews at the 2011 International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala, was noticed primarily for its foray into a social phenomenon that marks contemporary Kerala.
“I can’t remember such paranoia existing in the society in the name of religion in my growing up years. Religion was strictly a private matter. Today, there is no wonder if a God is born overnight. ‘Thattumporathappan’ is an attempt to bare the thinning margins between faith and superstition these days,” says Sudevan.
The 56-minute short film, shot on a video camera, has travelled to nearly a dozen film festivals in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The sparse cast, natural settings and straight narration used in delineating the chance occurrences leading upto the birth of a local deity, ‘Thattumporathappan’, won accolades for Sudevan, who scripted and directed the film.
Cinema tugged at the heart of this simple villager as a wonderful means to tell a story. He would have fared very well as a jack-of-all-trades, doing odd jobs to eke out a living in the remote village of Peringode in Palakkad district, but for an inherent talent for painting. The art of filling a canvas with colours and imbibing it with a life and story of its own was the only flaw that would warrant the later flights of fancy.
“I thought there were stories in the images of life around me. For a while, I wrote stories and screenplays and went around trying to get the film industry to notice them. That did not take me anywhere. Yet, I found myself lying awake with thoughts of telling the many little tales that go unnoticed through visual images. My neighbour and friend Achuthanandan and I would talk endlessly about making a cinema. His passion was in acting. During one such chat, we decided to go ahead and make a film using a hand-held camera. Thankfully, there wasn’t the burden of film-making lessons or theories to bog us down,” Sudevan remembers.
The expedition was purely impromptu and a hands-on training session for the aspiring film-maker. “We had to keep the cast as small as possible so as to make it easy to shoot with the single handicam that one of my friends lent me. The story of a misled traveller fitted the bill perfectly. It had just two characters. We shot within two or three kilometres of our homes. We made a 17-minute short film and sent it to the Kozhikode Ala Video Film Festival where it was screened in 2005. To our astonishment, it then got selected for the International Film Festival of Kerala where it was screened along with the films of Shyamaprasad and M G Sasi.”
Sudevan remembers sneaking out just before the open forum began at the IFFK venue for fear of dear life. The critics, he thought, were going to tear him apart for the amateurish film he had dished out. But the experience served to fill him with the much-needed confidence.
While the going is slow, the small crew of friends still manage to keep it reasonably good with one film every year since 2005. The money is pooled between them and the budget is always kept within checks, never exceeding twenty or thirty thousand. ‘Planning’ and ‘Randu’ made before ‘Thattumporathappan’ earned Sudevan a credible reputation as a talent to watch out for in the sparsely populated video film scene in Kerala.
The two-member cast in his films has only slightly been altered in ‘Thattumporathappan’, which is also his most expensive film till now with a budget of ` 65,000. “The money was contributed by my viewers and well-wishers from all over Kerala,” he says. He would like to look at the minimalistic casting as a challenge rather than a limitation.
“I am experimenting with the possibilities of telling my stories with just two people. There is also the challenge of eliciting the different characters from the same actors and holding the interest of the audience in them. I believe that requires a lot of faith in your skill as a story-teller and at the same time in the potential of your actors. Achuthanandan has played the lead role in all my films and he has won the Best Actor title at many festivals by now.”
He sees the changing social scenario in Kerala as worthy of documentation. “There was a time when Communist ideals laid the foundations of outlooks and attitudes. The way religious faith took a back seat had a lot to do with the sensibility of those times. And now, the reversal of that phenomenon also has to do with the wilting of those ideals in people’s minds,” he observes.
Sudevan hopes to make ten short films that would be a representative body of work on his village and Kerala in general. He leaves his characters nameless and expects them to speak for a whole people in times to come.