Name, place, animal, thing: The films of Don Palathara

Contemporary Malayalam filmmaker Don Palathara liberates narratives from their anthropocentric shackles, placing landscapes and locales at the centre

Don Palathara, born in 1986, belongs to the post-liberalisation generation of Indian cinema. Though he grew up in a world of digital excess and pace, he is a filmmaker obsessed with celluloid aesthetics and contemplative durations. He is also a filmmaker who in a short span of time — 5 films in 7 years — has evolved a signature visual and narrative style of his own, producing some of the most poignant and evocative B&W images (four out of his five films) in contemporary Indian cinema.

Perhaps Palathara’s choice of such an ‘archaic’ visual style draws from the narrative worlds he imagines and creates: vast, verdant landscapes, the undulating terrains of Kerala’s hilly regions, the flows and shifts of wind, light and water through them, the hardworking Christian families labouring on small tracts of rubber or coffee plantations, and the physical, sensual and spiritual worlds that envelop them. There is also something very Biblical about these vast exteriors of wind and light, the huge evanescent firmament looming over everything, the icons and pictures inside homes, and the drama of life and death that unfold there.