January 30, 2022 10:00:09 am
Director Rahul Sadasivan (Illustration: Suvajit Dey) How the film Bhoothakaalam makes you believe it’s all happening in your head
For an industry drawing praise around the world for its realistic storytelling techniques and content-driven scripts, horror, strangely, has not been a genre that the Malayalam cinema has particularly excelled in. The earliest horror film in the truest sense was cinematographer-director A Vincent’s Bhargavi Nilayam (Bhargavi’s Mansion) in 1964, a superhit at the time, based on a short story by acclaimed writer-freedom fighter Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, titled Neela Velicham (Blue Light, 1952)
What makes the web-series ‘As We See It’ so special
Though this trio is on the able end of the autistic spectrum, their trying to work around the curveballs thrown at them is heartwarming. Does it get any easier?
No, not really. It’s a hell of a burden. But it’s also a gift.
This exchange, in a new eight-part web-series As We See It, is between the father of a young adult with autism, and a long-time witness to the challenges both face. Twenty-something Jack says it like he sees it. He has no filters. He doesn’t really know the niceties of behaviour, of how to say one thing and mean another.
Five notable films that championed neurodivergence
Stills from the respective films. Far from saccharine-filled scripts that have neurodivergent protagonists, these are films layered with empathy, authenticity and spunk.
Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts series (2016-)
Luna Lovegood, who appears in four films in the Harry Potter series, has been seen as relatable by many autistic persons. Luna, played by Evanna Lynch, is something of an outlier —mysterious, mystical, and what non-neurodivergent people may call ‘quirky’. In the Fantastic Beasts series, Newt Scamander, played by Eddie Redmayne, has also been read as an autistic character.
15 Park Avenue (2005)
Directed by Aparna Sen, with a cast that includes Shabana Azmi, Konkona Sen Sharma, Waheeda Rehman and Dhritiman Chatterjee, 15 Park Avenue is the story of Meethi who is schizophrenic. She believes that her family lives at a non-existent address in Kolkata, 15 Park Avenue, a place that becomes the focal point of the film. The National Award-winning film follows the protagonist’s life down an empathetic and affirmative route.
Sundance 2022: Grand Jury Prize winner Shaunak Sen’s sublime and urgent documentary film All That Breathes is a kite’s-eye view of Delhi pollution
Wingman Salik with a baby black kite in a still from the documentary ‘All That Breathes’. If in his last film Cities of Sleep (2015), documentary filmmaker Shaunak Sen showed us “class” by training the hand-held lens on Delhi’s night shelters and those who sleep on its traffic dividers, in his latest, All That Breathes, the illustration of the Other gets sublime and urgent. The subject of inquiry are two brothers and their love affair with a species, the black kites (Milvus migrans), that they resuscitate. And how the human and “more-than-human” survive the “all-enveloping lamina of ecological hostility” and toxicity — in the air, on the ground.
Kali in Paris: When Delhi-based artist couple Manu and Madhvi Parekh’s artwork got a new lease of life at a haute couture show in the French capital
Delhi-based artists Manu and Madhvi Parekh (Source: Manu Parekh) In 1971, when artist Madhvi Parekh painted an image of Kali armed with weapons against an intricate backdrop of folk iconography, the thought of it travelling to a fashion ramp in the world’s sartorial capital Paris was inconceivable. Yet, five decades later, the work, World of Kali, turned out to be a conversation starter at the French capital at the spring-summer 2022 haute couture presentation of global luxury brand Christian Dior last week.
Let the climate play its tricks, the world will go on
Ducks on their way back home. (Credit: Ranjit Lal) For us warm, tropical beings, there is nothing more dispiriting than chilling, grey winter days, with a sullen sky dribbling down a thin rain, which nevertheless manages to turn the garden into a quagmire in very short order. Leaves droop miserably, birds huddle stoically; even monkeys look miserable and wet cats, well, look like wet cats! I stare out into the turgid gloom: Mother Nature looks at her bedraggled worst! And I wonder about those optimistic birds that have flown down thousands of kilometres from the frozen north just to avoid this kind of steely chill.
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