Tag Archives: Kammatipaadam

Urban Lens Film Festival 2017: List of Films to be Screened

The fourth edition of the Urban Lens Film Festival to be held in Bengaluru and New Delhi, remains committed to the idea that cinema allows us a space to reflect and re-examine the cities we live in. In order to open the Urban Lens Film Festival to a greater diversity of films from wider geographical regions, the festival, for the first time, put out a call for entries. The call received an overwhelming response with more than 1600 entries from 102 countries. The 27 films being screened this year include a selection from the open call and a set of invited films. These fiction, non-fiction and animation films mirror a cinematic truth about cities, framing them beyond their skylines by teasing out individual/collective stories and experiences of people from around the world.Continue reading “Urban Lens Film Festival 2017: List of Films to be Screened”

Schedule of Nitte University’s Maiden International Film Festival from April 24 to 27

Mangaluru is all set to witness International Film Festival (NIFF) organised by Nitte University from April 24 to 27, 2017 at Bharath Cinemas, Bharath Mall, Mangaluru.

It is an initiative by Nitte Institute of Communication aiming at showcasing award winning, and critically acclaimed cinema from across the world to audiences in Mangaluru.Continue reading “Schedule of Nitte University’s Maiden International Film Festival from April 24 to 27”

The 47th Kerala State Film Awards: Complete List of Winners

Earlier today in Thiruvananthapuram the 47th Kerala State Film Awards (for the year 2016) were announced by minister A.K.Balan. Films like Rajeev Ravi’s Kammatipaadam, Johnpaul George’s Guppy, Vinod Mankara’s Kambhoji and Dr.Biju’s Kaadu Pookkunna Neram were the major winners at the Kerala State Film Awards bestowed by the Kerala State Chalachitra Academy.Continue reading “The 47th Kerala State Film Awards: Complete List of Winners”

The Best of Indian Cinema in 2016: A Perspective

Let me begin by honestly admitting that 2016 was a lukewarm year for Indian Cinema, at least that would be something that I firmly believe in. Be it Bollywood/Hindi cinema or any of the regional language film industries, things were largely subdued for a major part of the year. Be it businesswise or with respect to the quality of output, 2016 definitely seemed to lag behind 2015, forget going anywhere beyond that for a comparison. It’s not that the year was totally beyond redemption, there were some positives as well, but they were not sufficient enough to completely lift up the spirit of Indian cinema overall. Let’s begin by taking a look at Bollywood to start with. 2016 saw only 2 big blockbusters, Sultan and Dangal, none of the other successful films were runaway hits as such. So while Salman Khan and Aamir Khan delivered big time with Sultan and Dangal respectively, SRK came up with Fan which met with a mixed response, while gaining back some traction with one of the better Hindi films of the year, Dear Zindagi.Continue reading “The Best of Indian Cinema in 2016: A Perspective”

The Best of Malayalam Cinema in 2016: A Perspective

2016 has turned out to be a slightly low key year for Malayalam Cinema overall, with strangely a decrease in the output, both in terms of quantity and quality. Talking of the number of releases there has been a sharp decline in terms of both straight as well as dubbed releases. From 153 releases overall last year (140 straight and 13 dubbed), 2016 saw the release count drop to 122 overall (118 straight releases and 4 dubbed films). And sadly the culmination of the year has ended on a really sad note for the industry, a pity considering the kind of promising films which were lined up for release in the Christmas-New Year festive season.  What started off as a tussle between the producers and distributors/exhibitors over revenue sharing and was expected to get resolved well before the Christmas weekend has extended into a huge deadlock of sorts. As a result all the major festival releases continue to wait for a release and will now in all certainty turn out to be the first few releases of 2017.Continue reading “The Best of Malayalam Cinema in 2016: A Perspective”

Kammatipaadam Movie Review: A Crime Saga from the Underbelly of Kochi

In today’s fast paced world we see tall skyscrapers housing residential or office complexes all around us. Gone are the days when this was a phenomenon restricted to the Metro cities alone, now it has even percolated down to all the State capitals & even further down. But have we ever bothered to know how these original cities once looked like? How the sites housing these large buildings once appeared to be as? A lot of these places were probably agricultural lands, wastelands or perhaps even slum dwellings where the poor lived, only to make way over course of time to these concrete jungles. Kochi or Cochin is one of those rapidly developing cities, a city that is becoming more and more cosmopolitan by the day. You hear people often say “Kochi ippol pazhaya Kochi alla” (Kochi now isn’t the same old Kochi like before) and perhaps Rajeev Ravi has kept all this in the back of his mind as he conceived his latest film Kammatipaadam, a tale that spans across three decades, taking us virtually into the underbelly of Kochi.Continue reading “Kammatipaadam Movie Review: A Crime Saga from the Underbelly of Kochi”