‘Konda Polam’ movie review: Life lessons from the wild

Krish Jagarlamudi’s fable-like coming-of-age Telugu film is a rewarding visual and musical experience, but needed more depth

There’s something comforting and reassuring about fables that pack in life lessons through simple stories. It’s like a throwback to a time when life was less complicated. At the heart of director Krish Jagarlamudi’s Konda Polam (forest grazing) is a fable-like story, adapted from the Telugu novel of the same name by Sanupureddy Venkatarami Reddy. In the process of shepherding a huge flock of sheep into the hilly jungles to survive drought in the plains, a young man rediscovers himself and finds his purpose in life.

The story is set in the arid Rayalaseema region, in the vicinity of Nallamala forest, though the film has been mostly filmed in Vikarabad and Ananthagiri hills owing to COVID-19 restrictions. Konda Polam draws our attention to a lesser-known fact — of shepherds in a village where water is a luxury, having to venture into the wilderness to find food and water for their flock of sheep. The seasoned shepherds, weathered by vagaries of life and the terrain, know how to survive in the jungles and stave off predators of all kinds — animals, reptiles and devious men.

Krish leads us into this world through Kataru Ravindra Yadav (Vaisshnav Tej), born into a shepherd family but somewhat of an outsider, since he has had the privilege of being educated rather than being pulled into tending sheep. But Ravindra has been following the herd of another sort, becoming an engineer with the hope that he will get a well-paying job, while neither understanding nor having an aptitude for it.