Koozhangal and the pebble-strewn road to Oscars for India

Fawning acceptance speeches, painfully inane jokes and wokeism aside, the Oscars are usually a model of ruthless efficiency, or at least we have been told to believe so. And so we do. But despite the ‘teary’ predictability of the entire affair, some of the predictions (of winners and losers) often go wrong, leaving hearts and, at times, TV screens broken. For India, sadly, it’s been more misses than hits.

Sixty-four years, more than 50 attempts, a few individual milestones and abundant disappointments later, the country of cinephiles will once again dare to dream the Oscar dream with a movie (for the Best International Feature Film category) that chronicles a walk through a parched land by a man and his son. In the process, PS Vinothraj’s small-budget Tamil film Koozhangal (Pebbles)—India’s official entry into the Oscars race for 2022—also showcases the scorched lives of people in rural Tamil Nadu.

While the Oscars have been awarded since 1929, the award for Best International Feature Film was instituted in 1956. India first participated in the competition the following year with Mehboob Khan’s Mother India. The movie lost to Italian drama Nights of Cabiria.

Most movies that India has sent to compete in the category since have been from the Hindi film industry. Only three Indian movies—Mother India (1957), Salaam Bombay! (1988) and Lagaan (2001)—have made it to the nomination stage so far. Tamil films were sent on 10 occasions and on seven of those, the movies were that of Kamal Haasan.

After repeated disappointments, Haasan said, “Oscars are given based on American standards. We should not worry if our films don’t win the award.”

The Indian audience, however, still ups its expectations each year when the country’s entries are announced. This year is no different.

Why Koozhangal

The 15-member panel headed by filmmaker Shaji N Karun that selected Koozhangal out of 14 films has said the film was chosen for its “humanism”.

“Made on a small budget, the film has got more cinematic achievements,” Karun earlier said at a media interaction.

Last month, Koozhangal was screened at the 52nd International Film Festival of India held in Goa. With minimal characters, the film has drawn the audience’s attention to a human crisis unfolding in rural Tamil Nadu where water is so scarce a resource that people are forced to think of ingenious but often painful ways to quench their thirst while making their way through miles and miles of parched land.

Ganapathy (played by writer and theatre artist Karuththadaiyaan) is an alcoholic, abusive husband who constantly picks fights with his wife Shanthi, a character not really shown in the movie but referred to succinctly enough to bring her to life. The couple has two children – Velu (played by Chella Pandi) and Lakshmi. While Velu goes to school, Lakshmi is just three. The family lives in an arid village.

On one particular occasion, Shanthi leaves Ganapathy’s house to go to her mother’s home in another village. Unable to bear the wife’s absence, Ganapathy along with Velu travels to Idayapatti, the village where his mother-in-law’s house is located, to bring back his wife.

Ganapathy reaches Idayapatti only to find Shanthi is not there but on her way back to their house. A heated argument is followed by an exchange of physical blows between Ganapathy and his in-laws. An incensed Ganapathy puts down the money he had been carrying during the fight. Consumed by anger, Ganapathy tells Velu to forget he had a mother and insists on returning back home. Unable to express his anger at his father’s words, Velu tears the notes that Ganapathy had put down. The father and son now have no money to buy tickets for the journey back home and decide to walk.

What lies ahead of them is a 13-km walk through a dry forest and a blazing sun promising to make things difficult. The rest of the movie is about the walk. The stark images of Ganapathy and Velu walking through the dry land in scorching heat make the audience feel thirsty too.

The walk covers the movie’s many subplots. On the way, the father-son duo comes across a family of four that hunts rats for food because nothing grows on the arid land. The cinematic language in which Vinothraj tells the story has hitherto been unexplored.

On their way, Velu puts a pebble in his mouth to salivate more and keep his mouth from drying. The pebble becomes a metaphor for not just the problem afflicting the region but also the troubles underpinning Ganapathy and Shanthi’s marriage. The movie is a poignant commentary on how lack of water in the region has shaped men to be more aggressive and women to be individuals who bury their anger inside and live exasperated and frustrated lives.

Inspiration

Fiction, more often than not, is reality told with a change of characters or reality as one would like it to pan out.

Born in abject poverty, Vinothraj lost his father at the age of 10. In order to support his mother and younger sister, he started to work in a garment industry in Tiruppur and so lost his early years to child labour.

Vinothraj wrote the story of Koozhangal in 2016 inspired by an urge “to extract revenge”. After a fight with her husband, Vinothraj’s sister was forced to walk through a dry forest at night along with her child.

“This affected me deeply. I wanted to take revenge on my brother-in-law in some form. So, I wrote a story in such a way that I made the husband walk in the scorching heat. After I completed this film, I screened it in my village. The women, including my sister, were crying inconsolably,” Vinothraj tells The Federal.

And what about the brother-in-law? “Interestingly, my brother-in-law, who supported us in making the film and also saw it, didn’t utter a word to me. They still have fights… They fight one day and patch up the next,” says Vinothraj.

Another personal struggle that found its way to the screen is the acute water scarcity that Vinothraj has tried to highlight through the journey of the father and son. Asked why he chose water scarcity as the theme, Vinothraj says he drew inspiration from the lives of two schoolgirls.

“The two girls used to bunk school on alternate days so that they could fetch water. Half the day would be spent just getting water. People have been living in these conditions for years. I don’t know if there will ever be a solution,” he adds.

While working on the script, Vinothraj joined a popular theatre group called Manal Magudi run by veteran theatre artist Muruga Boopathi.

“I travelled with them for a few years to learn and understand how a story can be effectively conveyed through body movements. It was here that I found Karuththadaiyaan to cast him in the lead role,” says Vinothraj.

It took five years to complete the film. “Between 2016 and 2020, I fine-tuned the script every now and then. When 75 per cent of the film was completed, we faced a lack of funds. So, we applied to the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) Film Bazaar, a platform that recommends the films that are in the developing stage to prospective producers. It is there that we chanced upon filmmaker Ram and showcased our rough cut,” he says.

Impressed by what he saw, Ram introduced them to actress Nayanthara and filmmaker Vignesh Shivan, who came forward to fund the project under Rowdy Pictures. “Since the film got good reviews within the fraternity, we decided to send it for film festivals,” he says.

At the 50th International Film Festival of Rotterdam held in February 2021, Koozhangal won the prestigious Tiger Award. Shot at Arittapatti village in Madurai, it is only the second Indian movie to win the Tiger Award after Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s Sexy Durga in 2017.

Vinothraj, who still has his feet firmly on the ground, says he has lost count of the awards he and his film have won at various film festivals. The film is likely to have a theatrical release after the Oscars. However, many are sceptical it would draw crowds to theatres since the film lacks songs and dance.

Deciding awards

“The film may not attract many film buffs who have over the years developed a taste for commercial films with a different cinematic language. This film, which has no commercial elements like songs and stunts, has an altogether different language with long duration shots. All the dialogues of the film can be compressed on a single page,” says Thirunavukkarasu, editor, Nizhal, a film journal.

Thirunavukkarasu is almost angry over the fact that India, unlike film fraternities abroad, hasn’t found its own brand of cinematic language. “Even after nearly hundred years, Tamil cinema has not found its cinematic language and it’s a shame,” adds Thirunavukkarasu, who also runs a film school in Chennai.

“Here, we just moved drama to films. We are not making films in the truest sense.”

Thirunavukkarasu’s film school gives hands-on training to students on the basics of cinema such as direction, cinematography and editing, among others. Interestingly, two of his students have worked in Koozhangal.

“Cinematographer Vignesh Kumulai and editor Ganesh Siva were my students,” Thirunavukkarasu says, brimming with pride. But he still feels Tamil cinema has a lot to learn more from the Malayalam film industry.

“There all the top actors will do an art house film, even without charging a fee. Such a trend doesn’t exist in Tamil cinema,” adds Thirunavukkarasu, even though he is not sure if Koozhangal’s ‘success’ will break some of the past trends in the Tamil industries.

The jury is still out

So what are the chances of Koozhangal winning the Oscars?

Writing in Deccan Herald on how film festivals are making their choices in screening and awarding a film, film critic MK Raghavendra says that films from all countries are not judged on the same parameters (say, cinematic competence and originality). The film must, instead, echo familiar narratives with regard to the culture it is from.

“It must boldly speak out the ‘truths’ already held about the culture,” he writes.

Koozhangal actually uses a visual aesthetic close to that of films from countries like Mali, a simple story in a dry landscape. “As its design, all it does is showcase extreme misery – locals smoking mice out of their burrows, breaking their legs and roasting them over a fire; people digging in the sand for a muddy trickle of water, a hungry puppy chewing on an empty water bottle,” he writes.

“These elements are unrelated, but the director, through the motif of a drunken man striding along an arid landscape with his son just pulled out of school, contrives to bring them together as a road movie would – as vignettes of life.”

AVM Shanmugam, one of the panellists in the Film Federation of India that nominated Koozhangal to Oscars, feels somewhat similarly.

“A movie should touch your heart more than your mind,” he says in an interview to Behindwoods, a YouTube channel.

According to him, this year films from 120 countries are contesting for the award under ‘Best International Feature Film’ category and the producers of those films must have spent 10 times more than Koozhangal’s budget.

“All the 120 films will be watched by around 7,500 members and you must communicate with each and every member to make them watch the film.” That, he adds, will be an arduous task.