Distilling vignettes of harsh lives in powerful visuals

Koozhangal, screened at IFFK, was India's official entry at Oscars this year

The first thing Tamil filmmaker P.S. Vinothraj remembered when he walked in with his crew to the packed Tagore Theatre here on Saturday for the screening of his film Koozhangal (Pebbles) in the International Competition category at the 26th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) was his own memories of jostling with the crowd years ago to get into the festival.

Koozhangal, which has won accolades at most of the festivals it has been screened in and was India's official entry at the Oscars this year, expectedly was the biggest draw at IFFK on the second day of the festival.

Alongside Vinothraj was his elder sister, whose experiences gave him the idea for the film. Her husband had thrown her out of her house with their baby, forcing her to walk several kilometres at night through the arid, punishing landscape to get back to her own house.

"I always wanted to make her husband walk like that," says Vinothraj. Well, he got his revenge on the screen with Koozhangal, a good part of which is about drunkard Ganapathy's long trek back home from his wife's house.

Ganapathy is unimaginably rough that he can heartlessly whack his young son's head and throw him on the ground. Karuththadaiyaan, the theatre actor who essayed Ganapathy's role, speaks about how he struggled to perfect the body language ('udal mozhi' in his words) for the role, including the straight-up, haughty gait.

Always high on alcohol, he picks up fights with random persons on the street. At his wife's house, he comes close to killing his brother-in-law and showers abuses at his mother-in-law. On the opposite pole stands his young, sensitive son Velu (Chellappandi) who quietly watches his unhinged father's violent ways, with a firm resolve on his eyes to never take after him.

As they trudge back home under the scorching sun through the dry landscape, it is his creative ways of getting revenge on the father and preventing him from getting back home fast and unleashing violence on his mother, that keeps the audience gripped. A broken piece of glass and the scorching sun is enough for him to inflict some mild revenge on his father.