LOADING
Directed by John Abraham | 115 minutes | All Ages | 40th Anniversary |
3:30pm Friday, 15 May | Balam Balam Place - Outdoors | FREE | Buy Passes
A deeply moving act of cinema as national portrait and political praxis by John Abraham and the Odessa Collective—presented outside and free for the public!
Purushan, a student on his way to Delhi, becomes obsessed with the suicide of a musician. His individual quest to learn more about a seemingly familiar face turns into a group effort to tell the musician’s mother of her son’s passing. This road trip through Kerala reveals much about the identity of not just a man but a land—both defined by great political turmoil.
The last movie directed by Indian avant garde filmmaker John Abraham, Report to Mother was produced by the Odessa Collective by travelling from town to town, putting on shows and screening Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid to raise funds from the public. The resulting film not only breathes the life of the everyperson but also really shows that life in hybrid documentary style, capturing actual strikes and protests alongside the fictional investigation. It’s affecting as drama and galvanising as political provocation. The ending deserves to be seen at an outdoor screening.
SIMILAR: Snowpiercer, Battle of Algiers, Born in Flames, Soy Cuba, Where is the Friend's House?, The Cloud-Capped Star, Strike! (1925)
“The hard work of mourning a person, a place, a history that never seems to change; an attempt to understand how a young activist became a corpse gradually swells into a polyphonic excavation of a whole people’s failed political struggles and cyclical disenfranchisement.” - jrhovind, Letterboxd
“John captures a time of crisis and upheaval where resistance seems to be everywhere and comes most readily from a Keralan youth galvanised by the impact of the Naxalite Movement in the late 1960s, a peasant insurgency that had widespread political implications for the establishment and Leftist political thought in India.” - Omar Ahmed, BFMAF
CONTENT WARNING: Discussions of suicide
Country: India
Year: 1986
Language: English, Malayalam, Tamil