The first occurrence of Covid-19 in India was officially recorded on 30 January last year in the city of Thrissur in the southern state of Kerala. Since then, Kerala’s capable handling of the pandemic has meant that it has been largely spared the brutal scenes and tragic images of the second wave of the pandemic elsewhere in India. Likewise, Kerala’s Malayalam-language film industry – right now the most dynamic of all India’s multiple regional producers – has seen a talented pool of young, new-wave film-makers deal superbly with the virus.
Where the Mumbai-based behemoth of Bollywood has barely chronicled this life-altering reality – the anthology Unpaused, released on Amazon Prime Video, is almost its only offering – Malayalam cinema is grappling with Covid with diverse film-making forms, styles and themes.
First-time director Sanu John Varghese’s Aarkkariyam (Who Knows?), which dropped on Amazon Prime Video recently, is about a young couple who shift temporarily from their Mumbai apartment, as the pandemic breaks, to a sprawling estate in Kerala where a disquieting secret and violent crime from the past is dredged up.
Dileesh Pothan’s adaptation of Macbeth, Joji, with Malayalam superstar Fahadh Faasil in the title role, is set during the pandemic among a dysfunctional, toxic, patriarchal family of plantation owners.
Independent writer-director Don Palathara puts relationships under the microscope in Santhoshathinte Onnam Rahasyam (Joyful Mystery), about a young couple facing an unwanted pregnancy, while his Everything Is Cinema is about a film-maker confined in a rented flat in an alien city with his actor wife, who decides to spend the time by making a film on their marriage from his personal perspective.
What has helped Malayalam cinema take on the pandemic so effectively?Despite its flourishing commercial core, the Malayalam film industry is a relatively small-scale enterprise, led by individual producers and not entrenched in big studio operations like its Hindi or Tamil counterparts. “The film-makers are quick in thinking up ideas, finding producers and moving fast on projects,” says Bina Paul, artistic director of the International film festival of Kerala. Paul also says that Malayalam cinema has always been “reactive”, quick in responding to changing social, political and economic realities. Back in 2019, filmmaker-actor Aashiq Abu made an edge-of-the-seat medical thriller called Virus, about the Nipah virus outbreak of 2018. It even had a fictional version of Kerala’s former health minister, KK Shailaja, lauded internationally for her efficient and empathetic tackling of both that outbreak and Covid. Acclaimed author NS Madhavan suggests that lockdown cinema is part of a thematic continuum. “For the past five years there has been a trend in Malayalam cinema of focusing on small, localised worlds, spaces, communities and situations,” he says.
This is all happening at a time when mainstream commercial Malayalam cinema, just like film industries in the rest of India, is in deep financial crisis. But the film industry in Kerala has been ingenious in working around the limitations imposed by the pandemic, using manpower, resources, money, locations and technology more frugally, efficiently and inventively than the rest. “It was the fastest in India to adapt to Covid restrictions,” says screenwriter Vivek Ranjit.
The rules for making lockdown-focused films have been simple: pick a subject that is more intimate than splashy, contained within a single location – usually a large house – has few characters and no difficult-to-mount scenes. Santhoshathinte Onnam Rahasyam has just two characters, with a third appearing briefly towards the end, is set entirely inside a car and was filmed in three days with the camera fixed on the dashboard. The exterior scenes in Everything Is Cinema were filmed before the pandemic; for the interiors, Sherin Catherine was the only actor, and director Palathara acted as a one-man crew filming her.
Palathara says he hopes that film-makers can keep the pandemic cinema flowing, finding creative ways to reflect our transformed social, economic and psychological states. The pandemic is very much an integral, inescapable part of our reality now – cinema’s most important role is to mark this crucial period in human history.
