The complete line-up of the much-awaited International Film Festival of Kerala (December 13-20) is out. One of the best curated and attended festivals in the country, IFFK will kick off with Brazilian director Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here. Salles’s first movie in 12 years is about an activist who copes with her husband’s disappearance in 1971 during Brazil’s dictatorship.
The annual festival is organised by the state government-backed Kerala State Chalachitra Academy. The 29th edition is taking place in the shadow of the Justice Hema Committee report on gender discrimination.
The report’s findings in August included rampant sexual abuse and illegal labour practices. IFFK’s Director, filmmaker Ranjith, was an early casualty of the report’s conclusions. Accused of sexual harassment – which he has denied – Ranjtih stepped down as the Chalachitra Academy’s chairperson. The Academy’s vice-chairperson Premkumar is serving as interim festival director.
The latest edition has a stated focus on films made by women. Renowned Hong Kong director Ann Hui will be given the Lifetime Achievement Award. Her films July Rhapsody, Boat People, Eighteen Springs, The Postmodern Life of My Aunt and A Simple Life will be screened.
The programme includes a package of films from Armenia and a section called The Female Gaze. Prolific Korean director Hong Sang-soo will be represented by his most recent movies as well as some of his older titles.
Payal Kapadia’s award-winning All We Imagine as Light is getting a special, single show. Many of the titles are representing their countries in the international feature category at the Oscars. Among the high-profile films are Queer, Anora, Emilia Perez, Conclave and Seed of the Sacred Fig. Here is a selection of the important and unmissable films.
An Unfinished Film
A production crew trying to complete production on a heavily delayed film runs into a seemingly insurmountable obstacle: Covid. Confined to their hotel rooms, the crew members connect with each other and their families through video calling.
Lou Ye’s An Unfinished Film stitches together fresh footage shot on mobile phones as well as behind-the-scenes clips from Ye’s previous films. Apart from being an unexpectedly moving tribute to the indomitable human spirit, the docufiction doubles up as a protest against China’s oppressive Covid containment practices.
Angammal
Vipin Radhakrishnan’s Tamil film, based on Perumal Murugan’s short story Kodithuni, stars Geetha Kailasam as a village woman who doesn’t feel the need to pair her sari with a blouse. Her modesty is protected just fine, but her city-educated son (Saran) is embarrassed, especially since he wants to get married.
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Anora
Sean Baker’s latest exploration of individuals on the fringes of society and morality won him the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Anora is named for a stripper (Mikey Madison), who hastily marries Vanya (Mark Eidelstein), the spoilt son of a Russian oligarch. When Vanya’s parents try to force a divorce between the couple, Anora’s dream life begins to unravel, and the movie really gets going.
Baker’s genre-meshing between sexually explicit drama, screwball comedy and social tragedy has deeply felt performances, especially by the outstanding Yura Borisov is outstanding as the stoic and remarkably wise hoodlum Igor.
April
The storyline – an obstetrician gets into trouble for carrying out illegal abortions – doesn’t do justice to the new film from Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili (Beginning, 2020). April uses its measured pacing, minimalist aesthetic and brooding sound design to mount a series of singular visual tableaux that won’t be forgotten in a hurry.
Armand
Norwegian director Halfdan Ullmann Tondel – the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullman picked up the best first feature award at Cannes for Armand. Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World) stars in a film about a schoolroom fight that balloons into something bigger.
Baghdad Messi
Iraq’s Oscar entry is the story of a boy with one leg and a dream of playing soccer. Director Sahim Omar Kalifa’s feature is based on his 2012 short film of the same name.
Black Dog
In Guan Hu’s poignant and visually striking Black Dog, unwanted stray dogs serve as a metaphor for the people left behind by China’s rapid development. With the 2008 Olympics in Beijing around the corner, dogs are being rounded up, but one escapes. Tasked with capturing the canine, a laconic stuntman played by Eddie Peng has a life-altering experience.
Black God, White Devil
Glauber Rocha’s 1964 Brazilian Western is one of the classics of the politically charged Cinema Novo (New Cinema) movement. Made when Rocha was 25, Black God, White Devil examines the social turmoil caused by a drought in 1940, which reveals the country’s troubled history.
Caught by the Tides
Chinese master Jia Zhangke reunites with his wife, the redoubtable Zhao Tao, for a characteristic blend of fiction and non-fiction. Caught by the Tides begins in 2001 and continues until 2023, when the world is in the grip of Covid. Tao plays a club singer who is separated from her lover, played by Li Zhubin. Echoes of Zhangke’s previous works, most of which have been shown at IFFK, resound throughout the film.
Chokh
Bengali director Utpalendu Chakraborty’s classic from 1982 is set during the Emergency. The film revolves around a mill owner who resorts to criminal methods to ensure an eye transplant for his blind son. The film stars Om Puri, Anil Chatterjee, Sreela Majumdar and Shyamanand Jalan.
Conclave
Oscar-winning director Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front) directs Ralph Fiennes, Isabella Rossellini, Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow in a scandal-filled exercise to select the next Pope. Fiennes plays the cardinal who gets more than he bargained for while choosing between four candidates.
East of Noon
Hala Elkoussy’s second film after Cactus Flower is a black-and-white drama with splotches of colour. Shot on 16mm, the film uses surrealist flourishes to explore the travails of a rebellious musician who feels hemmed in by his surroundings and stifled by his country’s regressive policies.
Emilia Perez
Although available on MUBI, Jacques Audiard’s musical about trans lives and transformation is a big-screen experience. A lawyer (a terrific Zoe Saldana) helps Mexican drug trafficker Manitas undergoes surgery to become Emilia (both roles played by Karla Sofia Gascon). When Emilia insists on re-uniting with her children, complications ensue between her and Manitas’s wife Jessie (Selena Gomez).
Flight 404
Hani Khalifa’s thriller will represent Egypt at the Oscars. Khalifa’s domestic hit stars Mona Zaki as a woman whose dubious past resurfaces just as she prepares to board a flight to Mecca.
Ghatashraddha
Girish Kasaravalli’s Kannada classic from 1977, restored by Film Heritage Foundation, is adapted from the UR Ananthamurthy short story of the same name. At a Vedic school in a village, the student regards the founder’s widowed daughter Yamuna as a mother-like figure. Yamuna’s relationship with a school teacher leads to a scandal that tears her life apart.
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Grand Tour
Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes’s visually mesmerising diary-like film shuttles between 1918 and the present, East Asia and Europe, monochrome and colour. In terms of a plot, we have an affianced couple separated by physical and emotional distance. Oblique but playful too, demanding both concentration and indulgence, the film is a typical product of Gomes’s protean mind.
If Only I Could Hibernate
Zoljargal Purevdash’s Mongolian film If Only I Could Hibernate goes beyond its readily camera-friendly settings to piercingly examine the dreams of an academically gifted teenager. His straitened circumstances, which include an alcoholic mother, threaten his hope of entering a prestigious physics competition that will fetch him a scholarship.
Khandhar
One of Mrinal Sen’s masterworks, Khandhar (The Ruins) is among the Indian classics being screened at IFFK. Adapted from Premendra Mitra’s story Telenepota Abishkar, the film was shot by Sen’s regular cinematographer KK Mahajan. Three friends on a trip – played by Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapur and Annu Kapoor – meet a woman (Shabana Azmi) and her paralysed mother (Gita Sen) who are caught in the trap of an old promise that remains unfulfilled.
Kneecap
Rich Peppiatt’s fats and funny Kneecap, about the Irish rap group of the same name, is destined to be a crowd favourite. The political comedy explores a generation that is neither fully distanced from the sectarian struggles in Norther Ireland between the 1960s and 1990s nor at peace with British control. Anxiety over the fate of the Irish language consumes the three heroes, played by the actual Kneecap band members.
Malu
Brazilian director Pedro Freire’s Malu explores a deeply relatable subject: the often fraught relationship between mothers and daughters. A rebellious actress (Yara de Novaes) has to deal with her mother (Juliana Carneiro da Cunha) and her daughter (Carol Duarte) if she has to fulfill her dream of setting up a cultural centre.
Maya Miriga
In Nirad Mohapatra’s Oriya classic, a family in a rambling house in Puri gradually falls apart. A Film Heritage Foundation presentation, Maya Miriga was produced in challenging circumstances and out of circulation for years before being rediscovered and restored.
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Meeting with Pol Pot
Cambodian director Rithy Panh’s engagement with the brutal Khmer Rogue regime in the 1970s has yielded some of the most important films about genocidal governments. Meeting with Pol Pot is a fictional drama starring Irene Jacob as one of three French nationals who travel to Cambodia during this period. Apart from meeting the dictator Pol Pot, they stumble upon evidence of his attacks on his own people.
Memories of a Burning Body
The sexual experiences of women in their sixties and seventies – as taboo during their formative years as it is in the present – inform the plot of Costa Rica’s Oscar submission.
Misericordia
In French director Alain Guiraudie’s thriller, nothing is quite what it seems, from a man who gets too close to his boss’s widow to a priest who won’t do a favour without getting something in return. The table – and the mood – is set for dark humour, surprises, and yearnings of the body and the heart.
My Favourite Cake
Maryam Moghaddam, who acted in Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain (2013), directed Ballad of a White Cow in 2020 along with her husband Behtash Sanaeeha. The couple’s new film revolves around a 70-year-old woman whose decision to pursue a relationship leads to upheaval. The filmmakers were barred from leaving Tehran to attend the several festivals to which My Favourite Cake was invited.
Pierce
Taiwanese filmmaker Nelicia Low’s feature debut revolves around the complex relationship between brothers, one a fencer and the other a recently released convict.
Pooja, Sir
Deepak Rauniyar’s Nepali thriller is a largely unspectacular police procedural about dramatic events: the kidnapping of two children. The backdrop is political unrest in Nepal in 2015, which unfolds even as tensions over the Madhesi community fester. Asha Magrati plays Pooja, a lesbian police detective whose investigation takes her down a rabbit hole.
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Queer
Luca Guadagnino follows up the erotic three-way romance Challengers with an erotic two-way romance between an American expat in 1950s Mexico City and a younger man. Ex-James Bond Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey star in the adaptation of the William S Burroughs novella of the same name.
Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust
Ishan Shukla’s Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust is noteworthy not only for being one of few full-length Indian animated productions. Through characters who wear bags on their heads and have no individual identity, Schirkoa explores freedom, rebellion and the role of propaganda in fomenting war. The voice cast includes Golshifteh Farahani, Lav Diaz, Gasper Noe, Lav Diaz, Asia Argento, Karan Johar, Shekhar Kapur, Anurag Kashyap, Denzel Smith and Piyush Mishra.
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Seed of the Sacred Fig
Dissident director Mohammad Rasoulof’s political drama reflects the Iran that he fled earlier in the year. A lawyer descends into paranoia over the pressures of his job, his missing gun, and the protests that sweep over his country, forcing him to reassess his relationship with the women in his family.
Seven Samurai
Akira Kurosawa’s period drama from 1945, about seven warriors helping a village fight off bandits, is frequently described as one of the greatest films ever made. A new restoration reveals why: a cast that includes acting legends Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura, some of the most complicated action choreography available in the pre-CGI era, memorable characters, camerawork that defies expectation; a sobering exploration of honour and valour. All 207 minutes are worth it.
Shahed
Co-written by Jafar Panahi and directed by Nader Saeivar, who himself co-wrote Panahi’s 3 Faces (2018), Shahed traces a teacher’s efforts to seek justice for the murder of her friend’s husband. The film is a tour of the inequities in Iranian society and the resistance of the brave few who dare speak out of turn.
Shambhala
Min Bahadur Bham’s unhurried, observational drama will represent Nepal at the Oscars. Shambhala is the story of a woman’s journey towards independence after her husband disappears. Thinley Lhamo’s central performance and Aziz Zhambakiyiv’s cinematography are among the film’s highlights.
Shikun
Veteran Israeli director Amos Gitai confronts the absurdity of his country’s social schisms through an absurdist plot set in a housing project. The residential complex reflects the diversity that characterises a country that is trying to project a monoculture. From Arabs to ultra-Orthodox Jews to Indians trying to learn Hebrew, they are all here.
Sima’s Song
Roya Sadat is a rare woman director from Afghanistan whose films stand up to the Talibanisation of her country. Forced into exile by the Taliban’s most recent takeover, Sadat is now a citizen of the world. Sima’s Song is set in 1978 and follows two college students dealing with Afghanistan’s encounter with Soviet rule.
Stranger Eyes
A Land Imagined director Yeo Siew Hua’s new movie stars Taiwanese legend Lee Kang-sheng. Stranger Eyes revolves around a man whose daughter disappears, following which he starts receiving video recordings that feature him. Might his neighbour be the culprit?
The Antique
Georgian director Rusudan Glurjidze’s The Antique was temporarily debarred from the Venice Film Festival over a copyright dispute that was later described as an attempt at censorship. Inspired by actual events, the film explores a woman’s efforts to resist deportation from Russia. All’s well that ends well: The Antique is representing Georgia at the Oscars.
The Divorce
The IFFK has been a consistent champion of cinema from the former Soviet bloc. Daniyar Salamat’s The Divorce is set in the 1920s, during the consolidation of Soviet control in Kazakhstan. The seriocomic film examines a couple’s decision to end their marriage, which exposes the prevailing attitudes towards women.
The Fable
Thithi director Raam Reddy’s new movie has a superb opening scene that is followed by an aesthetically pleasing exploration of magic realist themes. Manoj Bajpayee, Priyanka Bose and Deepak Dobriyal star in the strange story of an estate owner who flies over his property using bespoke wings, a series of unexplained fires, and a mysterious monk.
The Girl with the Needle
Danish director Magnus von Horn directs a period drama based on serial killer Dagmar Overbye, who targetted babies born out of wedlock in the 1920s. The chilling exploration of a base crime is filmed in black and white and told through a nurse played by Vic Carmen Sonne.
The Hyperboreans
Directed by Chilean directors Cristobal Leon (The Bones) and Joaquin Cocina, The Hyperboreans meshes stop-motion animation, actual footage, puppetry, made-up computer games and stage performances. While filming a script that originated in her patient’s mind, a psychologist find links to Nazi poet Miguel Serrano.
The New Year That Never Came
The latest from Romanian cinema marks Bogdan Mureaanu’s feature debut. The film is set during the Romanian Revolution in 1989, which saw the end of Nicolae Ceausescu’s long and oppressive reign.
The Outrun
Nora Fingscheidt’s English-language film stars Irish talent Saoirse Ronan as an alcoholic. Ronan’s performance is the highlight of a movie that explores the misery felt by women who struggle to overcome their emotional problems.
The Room Next Door
Although Pedro Almodovar’s first English-language film is far weaker than anything he has made recently, it’s still a colour-coordinated visual treat. Borrowing from the palette of such artists as Edward Hopper, the film explores the friendship between a writer (Tilda Swinton) who has decided to kill herself and her friend (a luminous Julianne Moore), who is asked to bear witness to the suicide.
The Story of Souleymane
French director Boris Lojkine’s The Story of Souleymane continues the preoccupation of European filmmakers with undocumented migrants to the Continent. The film follows a Guinean immigrant trying to make ends meet as a food delivery supplier while awaiting asylum.
The Substance
Demi Moore like you’ve never seen her before: her body and mind split into her present and her idealised self. Coralie Fargeat’s body horror film, which is also available on MUBI, spills out guts and home truths as its targets celebrity culture, ageism in show business, and the pressures on women to always look perfect.
The Teacher
Farah Nablusi’s 2023 feature is an urgent reminder of the tragedy of Palestine. Set before the current genocide, the film stars the brilliant Saleh Bakri as a teacher who bears the full brunt of occupation.
Three Kilometres to the End of the World
Another Romanian title examines homophobia through the story of a young man who is assaulted and the aftermath on him, his parents and his village. Emanuel Parvu’s won the Queer Palm at Cannes, and will represent Romania in the Best International Feature Film category at the Oscars.
To a Land Unknown
Danish-Palestinian director Mahdi Fleifel previously made the documentary A World Not Ours. His new feature revolves around Palestinian refugees in Athens who gets sucked into a smuggling racket.
Universal Language
In Matthew Rankin’s absurdist comedy, money inside a block of ice needs to be extracted, Iranian tourists gape at Winnipeg’s wonders, and a government employee decides to visit his mother. Rankin’s film is anything but conventional, filled with off-kilter humour and surrealist imagery.
Viet and Nam
In Minh Quy Truong’s feature debut Viet and Nam, two miners fall in love, but have to grapple with mysterious events revolving around their pasts.
Village Rockstars 2
Rima Das proves that a sequel can not only work but also enrich its predecessor. The guitar-loving Dhunu is now 17 years old and facing a new set of challenges – her mother’s poor health, romantic attachments, and the creeping effects of climate change on her village. The film has its maker’s trademark unhurried shot-taking, free-wheeling editing approach and lyrical depictions of characters who are one with their natural environment.
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Wait Until Spring
Acclaimed Iranian cinematographer Ashkan Ashkani, whose credits include Lantouri, Empty Nets and Mohammad Rasoulof’s films, makes his directorial debut with Wait Until Spring. The film follows a woman who slides into denial over her husband’s death by suicide.
