The Dispossessed

The film interprets a story from the Uttara Kanda of the epic poem Ramayana, where Rama sends his wife, Sita, to the jungle to satisfy his subjects. Sita is never actually seen in the film, but her virtual presence is compellingly evoked in the moods of the forest and the elements. The film retells the epic from a feminist perspective, and is about the tragedy of power and the sacrifices that adherence to dharma demands, including abandoning a chaste wife.

Uttarayanam is about Ravi, an unemployed young man, who has to face a series of encounters during his search for a job

Esthappan is a fisherman, who lives in a seashore colony. His story unfolds through narrations by other fishermen about his miraculous acts. Through the contradictory statements of these people, a mystical figure of Esthappan unfolds.

Chidambaram is based on a short story by noted Malayalam writer C V Shriraman. The film is a deeply symbolic exploration of the man-woman attraction leading to betrayal and eventually to the purgatory of guilt.

Panicker's one-act play deals with the relation of identification between an actor and his or her role. The action takes place on the eve of the last act of the Kathakali piece Keechakavadham (The Killing of Keechaka). The events surrounding the performance uncannily echo events in the play. One character even claims to have killed the lead actor of the play because he detested the character the man portrayed. However, the three different accounts that are presented of the same plot are never resolved or reconciled with each other. Each version is accompanied by a different style of folk music: the tune and rhythm of southern Kerala’s thampuran pattu, the pulluvan pattu and the ayappan pattu. The performers were drawn from the theatre and from Kathakali. In southern India, with its plethora of politicians using their film images to acquire inordinate wealth and power, Aravindan’s TV film bears on an eminently sensitive political as well as aesthetic issue.

A film about folk dances of India that deals with their broad classification with an assumption that these folk dances are governed by the moods and methods of their own with unlimited capacity to assimilate, improvise and vibrate with vitality.

The film is a Pied–Piper-like figment of Malabar’s folklore about a partly mythic and partly real magician called Kummatty. Kummatty travels from place to place and entertains children with dancing, singing and performing magic. At one such performance at a village, Kummatty starts to mingle with and weave a spell of carefree abandon around the children of the village. He turns a group of children into animals. But one boy, who was changed into a dog, is chased away and misses the moment Kummatty changed the children back to their human form. The dog-boy has to wait a year until Kummatty returns to the village to get back his human form.

In the 1950s a village in Kerala is preparing itself to be included in the nation's electric grid. Things are looking up for villagers and everyone is optimistic about the progress that electrification will bring. However soon some trouble brews starting with petty quarrels on trees being felled for the power lines. A series of unfortunate events follow the electrification as the village comes into terms with rapid modernization.

Documentary about the teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti.