Don't Tell Mother

Maybe the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz was right—“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” Artists look at their past as grist they can reframe on their terms. And this anxiety of re-writing one’s personal history sometimes shines through—the best memoirs are, after all, shameless and transgressive, and timid are those that cave under the weight of this trespassing anxiety. or writer-director Anoop Lokkur’s debut Kannada feature Don’t Tell Mother, which had its world premiere at the 30th Busan International Film Festival, this anxiety has been swept aside and muscled under by nostalgia. Set in Jayanagar, Bangalore in the 1990s—a significant Brahmin bastion—the film follows two siblings, Akaash (Siddharth Swaroop) and Adi (Anirudh P. Keserker), young boys inching towards self-hood, as they make space for their childhood alongside punctures of parental influence and interference, school-day routines, classmate cacophony, and the sudden calls and catfights with neighbourhood friends. They live next to a mosque, so the azaan becomes part of their life’s sounds—one the film makes forceful, by cutting to images of the chanting minarets. (In a post-Babri 1990s, when the Infosys IPO is being launched, you feel the film will say more about this, but it doesn’t, and lets these images, like that of Muharram, puncture the proceedings as a form of spectacle without discourse.)