‘Cinema shouldn’t be limited to one kind of storytelling’: Don Palathara

The indie filmmaker believes the medium can transcend traditional narratives, pushing beyond the boundaries of storytelling itself.

Malayalam has a history of parallel cinema movement, but Don Palathara did not grow up distinguishing cinema as such and was not aware of it until much later when he was in film school. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

Even among independent filmmakers, Don Palathara is an outlier. His latest film Family premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2023 and travelled to festivals including the Bengaluru International Film Festival, the International Film Festival of India, and the International Film Festival of Kerala. Starring Vinay Forrt and Divya Prabha among a talented ensemble, Family will have a theatrical release on February 23, 2024, and in the run-up to that, director Anurag Kashyap released the trailer on January 27 at an event in Kerala.

But Palathara had promised to be at Film Society Bhubaneswar’s 13th Indian Film Festival with the film. So, he missed this event in Kerala—the first of its kind in his career of independent films that had no theatrical releases—to honour his commitment to the film society in Odisha. It is rare to see a filmmaker living up to his word, let alone to a modest community of film lovers. At the festival, he blended into the crowd, and one could not tell if he was an attendee or a filmmaker. He shared his wisdom with the mostly young audience made of students and later sat down with this writer for an hour of conversation.

Palathara has made six features in a span of eight years. His first film Shavam (2015) revolves around a funeral and the commotion, community, and camaraderie within. Vith (2017), his sophomore effort, captures everyday life in the mofussil that turns into a menacing stare into the abyss. The third film, 1956, Central Travancore (2019), is about brothers who go into the forest to hunt for a gaur.

The first three films were shot in black and white. He waded partially into colour for the first time with his docu-fiction Everything is Cinema (2021) and fully with Santhoshathinte Onnam Rahasyam (2021). They were pandemic-induced lockdown films that incorporated the mood into them. The setting functioned as constraints woven into the fabric of the films to assess the limits of the characters that occupy it.

Family (2023) contains Don Palathara’s signature elements—set around Idukki, a lived-in atmosphere of the place, no single protagonist, the biblical elements, pastel walls and framed photographs of families and their ancestors, stray conversations captured from a distance, and the chokehold of the Church. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

Family (2023) is his sixth film set around a local hillside parish where the church employs a stronghold over the community and either protects or hand-waves the societal plagues. Not many independent filmmakers can boast of six features in such a short period. But Palathara does not like the word “prolific” and rejects labels altogether.

“You give yourself any label, you begin to limit yourself. I do not want to have that kind of labelling or restrictions. It is a trap. After Vith, I did not make a film for two years.” he said. “I did not plan any of it. You never know what you are going to make next. Maybe there won’t be a film for 10 years.” He cites Víctor Erice, the Spanish director of films like The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) and El Sur (1983) who surfaces once a decade with a great film; after 30 years, he returned with a masterpiece in Close Your Eyes (2023).

Freedom and consistency

Palathara does not remember what exactly he felt after making his first film. All he cared about was the freedom to make the kind of films he wanted to make. He is aware of the precarious nature of independent filmmaking, especially in a country like India. “It is not a viable career option, right? Something I told myself while making Shavam was that if I continue making films for 10 years, then I can call myself a filmmaker. Consistency matters in the sense of how long you enjoy doing what you do. Do you enjoy the freedom to do what you love long enough?”

Cinema was not on his mind when he was a teenager. He grew up as a son of two teachers, which had a two-pronged effect. He acknowledges the privilege of an environment where they encouraged him to read and question everything around him. “On one side there was religious oppression and control, but I also had the opportunity to read a lot of books.”

His father sparked the questioning spirit in him, but Palathara feels that he questioned too much or questioned in ways his father did not expect. Religion and faith were regular topics and though he believed his father was not a rebellious person, he recognised there was a man of reason too somewhere in him with a touch of rebelliousness.

During a time when Palathara was simply a blind believer, around the age of 13, his father passed away—that moment remains a catalyst in his adult life. “At that point, I had so many questions with no answers. Conversations with God and religion had no solutions for me. Faith slowly faded away, but the questioning habit remained.”

Cinema is where he channelled that search. “After a certain time, you realise that there is no inherent meaning, it is what we assign to things. I assigned meaning to cinema because it is more of a creative process, and we can mould it according to our wish rather than base it upon any single text.”

Pillars of Palathara’s cinema

Faith, religion, and community remain the pillars of Don Palathara’s cinema and the idea of his debut film Shavam came to him when he was a film student in Sydney. Shavam is a day at a funeral, but it develops as a sense of place around the event. We see men drinking, discussing cricket matches or local gossip and the camera remains a passive observer of events from the outside. Palathara said a lot of these films are about childhood. “Not in a direct way but my childhood. Like you observed, it is not about the funeral but about the society.”

Palathara gleaned a contrast in the way he was treated between when he was abroad and when he returned. He noticed that society considered a person abroad as “successful”, but as soon as they return home with no bank balance and an ambition to make independent cinema, it sees them in a different light. “I had to deal with this in some way and Shavam was my way of dealing with it.”

For Vith (2017), a story of two people stuck in the middle with the right and wrong blurred, he wanted to go with greyscales. The film does not have full blacks and full whites. | Photo Credit: YouTube Screengrab

Vith also came from that idea. “The conflict was there. Between me and my mother, my immediate relatives and even friends I had as a child. I understood we had all parted ways in the lens with which we looked at life around us. The films came about as my coping mechanism.”

Choosing monochrome

Palathara made the conscious choice of going for black and white for his first three films. He once believed that he would be working exclusively in the black and white form throughout his career. It was not obvious before Shavam. They tried filming in colour, and he did not like the look. For Vith, a story of two people stuck in the middle with the right and wrong blurred, he wanted to go with greyscales. The film does not have full blacks and full whites.

With 1956, Central Travancore, he chose monochrome, but the lighting in the film is unique—he wanted it to look different from his earlier films—in both the interiors as well as the exteriors which are mostly the hills and forests. “I decided I shouldn’t limit myself and I thought I’d let the film decide.” 1956 is set during a watershed moment in Kerala with the early migration to Idukki just on the eve of the land reformation bills in a state that sought to put an end to long existing feudal relations and systems.

But once again in a Palathara film, there is no single protagonist. It is the story of the people—Palathara grew up in Idukki district—distilled through its own medium: storytelling. The film is replete with people telling stories, sharing anecdotes, or narrating interesting events. It is storytelling as an aesthetic choice. “That was the idea”, he agrees. “When I first thought about the film, I had the story at the back of my head. It came from my grandfather. I wanted the structure of the film to mirror that aspect. The reason I am retelling these stories was because my grandfather chose to share them with me. The style was intrinsic to the film I wanted to make.”

Looking inward

Like it did for many, the lockdown made Don Palathara look inward with two quick films in Everything is Cinema and Santhoshathinte Onnam Rahasyam (Joyful Mystery). While the former excavates the hidden insecurities and hypocrisies of a filmmaker when he is locked up with his partner and unable to step outside and film, the latter takes a hard look at the dynamics of a relationship as it unfurls within the claustrophobic space of a car throughout its runtime.

Sherin Catherine—who also appears in Everything is Cinema as the partner—shares writing credits with him in the film. “I wanted the film to portray the filmmaker in two lights. What he wants to portray to the outside world, the pseudo-intellectual that he is and how his darker side comes out in the interior spaces.”

Something like Everything is Cinema speaks to how self-aware Don Palathara is as a filmmaker and an artist’s place in the larger society. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

Palathara concedes that he made the film as a semi-joke. Is Everything is Cinema informed by everything from his own growth and personal experience as a filmmaker and his interactions with peers and the larger world? “All of it. All these crazy thoughts we would have, how different the filmmaker is from the actual person, how different we are from our social media characters.” He accepted the reality then and adapted to a new world where there would be no funding, no crew and films had to be made under entirely alien circumstances.

“It was just Sherin and me in the house. She was supportive and interested in making something. I was editing footage I had shot in Kolkata a few years ago and suddenly the idea about this filmmaker came up and we collaborated. There was no traditional chronology of the filmmaking process. We filmed something one day, we were editing another day or writing monologues. It was a new experience.” He considers the film dark, and it is difficult for him to watch today but he is glad it happened.

Santhoshathinte Onnam Rahasyam came as a direct consequence of the darkness in Everything is Cinema. Palathara was reading short stories of Vaikom Muhammad Basheer and wanted to do something like that on screen. The result was the film starring Rima Kallingal and Jithin Puthenchery.

As he loves to impose restrictions—for a film written, made, and shown during the pandemic—he limited himself to the dashboard of a car and the couple in conversation through the length of the film. “It was like making fun of oneself. It is like Everything is Cinema, but I could see it in a funnier light. It became a film about relationships because you are stuck in a room with your partner for two years. How can you even cope with another person for that long?” It was natural to think of people-talking-in-a-room film again, but Palathara wanted no door to escape. He chose a moving car in the middle of a pandemic where everyone is apprehensive of coming face to face with one another. He wanted the couple to be limited in both time and space.

Don Palathara loves to impose restrictions—for a film written, made, and shown during the pandemic—he limited himself to the dashboard of a car and the couple in conversation through the length of the film. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

Something like Everything is Cinema speaks to how self-aware Palathara is as a filmmaker and an artist’s place in the larger society. It is possible that the attitude stems from a strong and long-standing film appreciation culture in Kerala. “I cannot speak for other filmmakers but there are certain times when you need to reflect on yourself. We are in a space where we get a lot of respect and sometimes, we do not really earn it. People put you on a pedestal. That was another thought process behind the film. I don’t know if anybody is worthy of the amount of respect that you get in this industry.”

Style and influences

During an earlier conversation, Palathara had mentioned his affinity for Robert Bresson and his influence. “There are several influences. If you hadn’t reminded me of that conversation, I would have given you a different name now. Bresson and [Yasujirō] Ozu are up there, their minimal approach to the medium and reducing the elements of cinema to its basics attract me as well.”

He declares that grandiosity and spectacle in cinema give him no pause. It has nothing to do with the number of people on screen for him. Like, he points out a scene in Family with about 300 people in a hall. It is designed and filmed in the quietest, most distinct way possible.

Family, co-written with Sherin Catherine, contains Palathara’s signature elements—set around Idukki, a lived-in atmosphere of the place, no single protagonist, the biblical elements, pastel walls and framed photographs of families and their ancestors, stray conversations captured from a distance, and the chokehold of the Church. “We had a look at many houses in the area, some we could use and some not. Most had the characteristics we wanted and others we repainted.” They did a storyboard incorporating all these spaces that they had even though a few changed during filming.

Palathara did not want the colours to be distracting, to take attention away from the scene. “I wanted the audience to have the freedom to look everywhere, like my black and white films.” In Family, Palathara’s early childhood and the predicament and inability to reckon with religion and faith that he talked about earlier is palpable.

Indie vs mainstream

He is not sure what he will film next. It could be an adaptation of a literary work or scripts he has lined up. Malayalam has a history of parallel cinema movement, but Palathara did not grow up distinguishing cinema as such and was not aware of it until much later when he was in film school. “There is one film society 30 km away from my town, but I discovered it only after I made Shavam and was touring the State screening the film. I must admit I did not come from such a background. On a personal level, even if I were from, say, Tamil Nadu, I would have made the same kind of films.”

He is careful about being bullish about Malayalam cinema as it does come with caveats. At one level, he is happy there is fluid movement of actors between mainstream and independent films and that they prefer juggling both and do not see it as doing one a favour. “It helps filmmakers, probably not at the beginning but after making two or three films they become approachable.”

But he is also careful about the traps of mainstream cinema patterns and actors who come with certain baggage. “They might be used to making films in set ways and showing films in certain ways. Since independent films don’t have great avenues for distribution, one is forced to make it in a style that would bring people to the theatres.”

For Don Palathara, cinema is a vast medium and even though Malayalam films are well regarded, he bemoans the lack of experimental or avant-garde cinema. “For me, cinema shouldn’t be limited to a kind of storytelling or storytelling itself. There is more than just narrative cinema.”

Aditya Shrikrishna is a film critic based in Bhubaneswar