Mollywood director Anjali Menon’s Watching List for you during lockdown

Staying indoors for a while? We have you covered. For your weekly Watching List, we have one of Malayalam cinema’s biggest filmmakers, Anjali Menon, sharing the list of movies and TV shows that she would recommend for readers. During the lockdown, Anjali says she has become a film student again “because I believe that a filmmaker is only as relevant as how much they hone their skills and it is so easy to get outdated. It is important to be learning all the time”.

I have been attending the Masterclass series by leading filmmakers. It is a wonderful series of online tutorial. It is fantastic to watch filmmakers like Mira Nair and Ron Howard and writers like Neil Gaiman discussing their craft. My usual practice is to read books about it. This is the first time I have engaged in online masterclasses and I am enjoying it. It is not just about filmmaking. My son and I enjoyed watching a masterclass in chess by none other than Gary Kasparov. Where in the world would you have that opportunity?

I am getting to watch movies that I have not got a chance to watch, especially web series on OTT platforms. I really have not been someone who has caught on to the webs series just because of the lack of time. Now, that is happening. I watched a few series. It is also to see as a writer how characters are formed and how they are developed for a longer format, one which I am not familiar with. For instance, I had seen The Crown, but this time, it was not a rushed viewing. It is quite fascinating to see how it is written. Watched the entire series of Made in Heaven and Unbelievable.

And I also had the chance to show my son some of the television show we used to watch as kids.

I have also been catching up with anthologies. I had also directed one in Kerala Café a long time ago. There is an entire series about cities such as Berlin, Cairo, New York etc, which are great fun to watch. Then there are the movies that are in sequel mode. The Before Trilogy for instance. It is great fun to watch those back-to-back because all three have been made by the same director Richard Linklater, who worked with the same actors. You can see how they have all grown together and how much more organic the filmmaking has become.

It is engrossing to watch a filmmaker’s body of work, one after the other. When I was 14, I made a list of my favourite movies. Many of them were in Malayalam. I did not read Malayalam so I had no idea who made them. Finally, I wrote them down and found out who made those films. It was a list that had some 40-plus movies — most of which was directed by one man called Padmarajan. For the first time I realized how that one person has actually given us so much content that is so relatable and obviously there is a sensibility there. Even in the films he has written, if not directed, there was his touch. Now is the time to go back to that learning and watch a filmmaker’s body of work instead of just one film.

Regional films

One of the advantages of OTP platforms is that it has helped us to go back to those days when one used to sit before the television on Sunday afternoons to watch regional movies. I remember doing that back then. Now, we have access to films from all over India. And I am leaning towards watching those regional films than anything else. More than the Bollywood blockbusters, I am much more excited by what is coming from regional languages as they are more culturally oriented.