And There Was a Village...

Unni

Marattam

Panicker's one-act play deals with the relation of identification between an actor and his or her role. The action takes place on the eve of the last act of the Kathakali piece Keechakavadham (The Killing of Keechaka). The events surrounding the performance uncannily echo events in the play. One character even claims to have killed the lead actor of the play because he detested the character the man portrayed. However, the three different accounts that are presented of the same plot are never resolved or reconciled with each other. Each version is accompanied by a different style of folk music: the tune and rhythm of southern Kerala’s thampuran pattu, the pulluvan pattu and the ayappan pattu. The performers were drawn from the theatre and from Kathakali. In southern India, with its plethora of politicians using their film images to acquire inordinate wealth and power, Aravindan’s TV film bears on an eminently sensitive political as well as aesthetic issue.

Vasthuhara

Vasthuhara (Malayalam: വാസ്തുഹാര English: The Dispossessed) is a Malayalam social film by the late G. Aravindan which looks into the lives of partition refugees from East Bengal to West Bengal.

Chidambaram

Chidambaram is based on a short story by noted Malayalam writer C. V. Shriraman. The film is a deeply symbolic exploration of the man-woman attraction leading to betrayal and eventually to the purgatory of guilt.

The Circus Tent

The arrival of a travelling circus sends ripples through the inhabitants of a remote Keralan village.

Pokkuveyil

A young artist lives with his father, a radical friend and music loving young woman. His father dies, the radical friend leaves him and the woman is taken away by her family to another city.

Piravi

When his son fails to arrive home to attend his daughter's engagement ceremony, aging patriarch Raghava Chakyar waits daily for him at the bus stop. He soon comes to learn that his son, Raghu, was taken into police custody for political reasons and tries to get to the bottom of this.

Kanchana Sita

The film interprets a story from the Uttara Kanda of the epic poem Ramayana, where Rama sends his wife, Sita, to the jungle to satisfy his subjects. Sita is never actually seen in the film, but her virtual presence is compellingly evoked in the moods of the forest and the elements. The film retells the epic from a womens' liberationist perspective, and is about the tragedy of power and the sacrifices that adherence to dharma demands, including abandoning a chaste wife.

Kummatty

A stranger who may be the trickster magician Kummatty comes to a village in Malabar, India.

Throne of Capricorn

Ravi, an unemployed young man, faces a series of encounters during his search for a job.

Esthappan

Esthappan is a fisherman, who lives in a seashore colony. His story unfolds through narrations by other fishermen about his miraculous acts. Through the contradictory statements of these people, a mystical figure of Esthappan unfolds.

G. Aravindan - Interview with Thomas Waugh

Interview with Indian filmmaker G. Aravindan, conducted by Thomas Waugh, 1988.

Arlington Road

Bedraggled college professor Michael Faraday has been vexed — and increasingly paranoid — since his wife's accidental death in a botched FBI operation. When a seemingly all-American couple set up house next door, Michael begins to suspect there’s more to them than meets the eye.

Mouchette

A young girl living in the French countryside suffers constant indignities at the hand of alcoholism and her fellow man.

Newton

A government clerk on election duty in a conflict-ridden jungle of Central India tries his best to conduct free and fair voting despite the apathy of security forces and the looming fear of guerrilla attacks by communist rebels.

The Contender

The vice president is dead, and as the president makes his choice for a replacement, a secret contest of wills is being waged by a formidable rival. When Senator Laine Hanson is nominated as the first woman in history to hold the office, hidden agendas explode into a battle for power.

The Grocer's Son

Antoine Sforza, a thirty-year-old young man, left his village ten years before in order to start a new life in the big city, but now that his father, a traveling grocer, is in hospital after a stroke, he more or less reluctantly accepts to come back to replace him in his daily rounds.

Train of Life

In 1941, the inhabitants of a small Jewish village in Central Europe organize a fake deportation train so that they can escape the Nazis and flee to Palestine.

The Edukators

Three activists cobble together a kidnapping plot after they encounter a businessman in his home.

JFK

Follows the investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy led by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison.