The Adamant Girl or Kottukkaali, the second Tamil film by Vinothraj PS, charts out the road trip of a family to a shaman to exorcise a young girl, Meena (Anna Ben), of the love she feels for a lower-caste man. It is an exquisite exploration of anger that can be both violent and silent. On the one hand is the fury of the future husband of the girl, Pandi (Soori Muthuchamy), that tries to beat her to submission, and on the other is her own rage that is about defying any attempts at subjugation. The film is a transformative journey, with the finale throwing up some vital questions. Who really is the one possessed? And who is in control? Who needs to be cured? And of what? Love or anger?
The film proves Vinothraj to be a formidable talent with a signature cinematic style to boot. One that is steered by physical movement than guided by spoken words with the camera constantly following the characters as they keep walking, thereby taking the audience along into their world.
Kottukkaali is one of the three Indian feature films drawing packed houses in Berlinale 2024. The other two are Raam Reddy’s Hindi-English language The Fable, about the mysterious goings-on in a Himalayan orchard and Siddharta Jatla’s Hindi film, In the Belly of a Tiger, that mixes myth, metaphor and reality to show how deprivation can drive people to boundless desperation in rural India.
The show of enthusiasm in Berlin comes quick on the heels of a slew of awards bagged by Indian indies at the international film festivals in Sundance, Rotterdam and Clermont-Ferrand. Shuchi Talati’s unfussy-yet-complex, audacious-but-warm Girls Will Be Girls, about a teenager’s sexual awakening and her stormy relationship with her mother, won the audience award in the World Cinema Dramatic section at Sundance and lead actor Preeti Panigrahi was presented the special jury award for acting.
At the same festival, the special jury prize for craft in the World Cinema Documentary section went to Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan’s Nocturnes, an intimate and immersive peep into the secret lives of moths, with vivid visuals and stunning sound design.
Rishi Chandna’s Tamil short Virundhu (The Feast), the only Indian film competing in the world’s largest festival of short films, Clermont-Ferrand, won the special international jury prize. It is about a prawn-picker setting up a lavish meal for a powerful politician from her own fishing community, all to bring to the table the urgency to save the local lake and its biodiversity from industrial pollution.
Midhun Murali’s Malayalam-English Kiss Wagon won the special jury as well as the Fipresci awards at Rotterdam with a citation describing it as a “weirdly beautiful and beautifully weird film”. Ishan Shukla's animation feature, Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust, bagged the NETPAC award at Rotterdam. About a dystopian world where people are forced to give up their faces and identities to become mechanised paper bag heads, it marks a visually stunning leap forward for Indian animation and engages with thorny issues plaguing the post-truth world—mind management, immigration, hatred and bigotry.
It has been particularly great going for emerging Tamil cinema with international festivals, especially Rotterdam, taking note of it and putting their money where their mouth is.
This year Rotterdam celebrated the potent mix of offbeat and mainstream Tamil films, with the international premiere of Avinash Prakash’s Naangal in the Bright Future section, and the premiere of Ram’s Seven Seas Seven Hills in the Big Screen Competition section. The high points of the Limelight section were the premiere of Karthik Subbaraj’s Jigarthanda Double X and the world premiere of Vetri Maaran’s Viduthalai I&II.
What’s heartening to note is that most of the recent films being celebrated in the festival circuit are from a young, fresh talent pool that has come to inhabit cinema from diverse backgrounds—from Talati and Reddy, who have been trained abroad, to a homegrown, self-taught Vinothraj, who got inspired to make films while seeing shoots around his hometown of Arittapatti near Madurai and selling DVDs of masters like Majid Majidi and Stanley Kubrick by the roadside in Chennai.
Their subjects and experimentation with the craft are wide-ranging. While being rooted in immediate cultures and contexts, their films throb with universal experiences and emotions, explaining their appeal and appreciation abroad.
After making some remarkable shorts about gender, sensuality and agency, Talati marks her feature debut with Girls Will Be Girls. Schirkoa is Shukla’s feature debut, based on his own 2016 short. After two short documentaries, Virundhu marks Chandna’s first foray into fiction, that too in Tamil.
Reddy’s is a long-awaited return with The Fable, almost a decade after his Kannada debut feature Thithi. It had its world premiere in 2015 in Locarno, where it won the Golden Leopard Filmmakers of the Present award.
Kottukkaali is Vinothraj’s sophomore feature film, after the remarkable Koozhangal (Pebbles), that opened in the thick of the pandemic in 2021 at Rotterdam and walked away with the prestigious Tiger award.
It’s a measure of the faith in their talent that popular, established names and veterans in the game have joined hands with these young filmmakers. Girls Will Be Girls has popular actors Richa Chadha and Ali Fazal as producers.
While Thithi and Koozhangal were small in scale and ambition, the stakes have gotten bigger in second outings. Kottukkaali is produced by mega star Sivakarthikeyan, with popular actors Soori Muthuchamy and Anna Ben playing leads. The Fable has Manoj Bajpayee, Tillotama Shome, Priyanka Bose and Deepak Dobriyal in its star-studded cast.
Schirkoa has voiceovers from acclaimed Indian and international personalities such as Shekhar Kapur, Karan Johar, Anurag Kashyap, Piyush Mishra, Golshifteh Farahani, Asia Argento, Lav Diaz and Gasper Noe. Oscar-winning Resul Pookutty has done the sound for In the Belly of a Tiger and the background score is from none other than Shigeru Umebayashi, most widely known for ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ in Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. Suffice to say that small is indeed big.
Namrata Joshi
Consulting Editor
Follow her on X @Namrata_Joshi