Naangal

In Avinash Prakash’s Tamil feature film Naangal which premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam this week, time is stretched by a limited set of events as if perched on a non-stop Ferris wheel. They are the same moments with their ups and downs, same life-altering triggers that repeat in a cyclical fashion. Three preadolescent siblings — Karthik (Mithun V, eldest, 13 years old), Dhruv (Rithik Mohan) and Gautam (Nithin D) — live somewhere near Lovedale in the hills of Tamil Nadu with their father (Abdul Rafe as Rajkumar) who owns plantations, a house too huge for four individuals and is the Chairman and Principal of their modest school.

Epic in length - it has a runtime of nearly four and a half hours - but squarely focused on the minutiae of the life of three boys and their excessively stern father, Naangal (This Is Us) is an exceptional piece of cinema. Calling it a piece of anything would be somewhat incongruous - it is far larger than that. Naangal - the Tamil film is part of the Asian Cinema Competition at the ongoing 15th Bengaluru International Film Festival - is a striking and sweeping collage of innumerable shards of memory, mostly unsettling, collated and rendered in the form stunning images underwired by a fantastic background score and strung together with impressive skill and imagination. Written, directed, shot and edited by Avinash Prakash, Naangal has the look of a work helmed by a seasoned director. But it is a debut film. A deeply personal essay, its length is bound to be commented on. What is important is that the time that Naangal takes to tell a story that spans about a decade seems completely justified. Growing up is never easy particularly when home isn’t what it is meant to be - sweet home.

Cwtch, which means embracing someone to offer a sense of warmth, is a famous Welsh word some of us might be familiar with. An inter-title before Naangal commences introduces us to another one word — Hiraeth — which means homesickness for a home one cannot return to or one that never existed. Very rarely can an entire film’s plot, conflict and resolution be summed up in a word, and director Avinash Prakash establishes precisely that in the first frame of his film, which also doubles as his biographical. With Naangal, Avinash puts us in the middle of three brothers’ traumatic yet transformative upbringing in a dysfunctional family. Rajkumar (Abdul Rafe) is a man whose once-affluent family is now bankrupt. After parting ways with his wife and some financial setbacks, he has become the chairman of a run-down school. With no place to assert dominance, he takes it out on his three children — Karthik (Mithun V), Dhruv (Rithik Mohan) and Gautam (Nithin D) — who stay with him and are forced to endure his physical and emotional torture. What happens when their resilience gets tested forms the rest of Naangal.