THIRUVANANTHPAURAM: Veteran filmmaker K.P. Kumaran, one of the pioneers of Malayalam New Wave, said that filmmakers of his generation would not have dared to attempt a film like Mahesh Narayanan’s Take Off. It was technology, or lack of it, that made Kumaran’s generation wary of taking up ambitious projects like Take Off, which tells the story of Malayali nurses stranded in Tikrit, the Iraqi town strafed with missiles and bullets.
“In those times, raw film was so precious that, unlike digital filmmakers of today, we could not expose it as we liked,” Mr Kumaran said at the IFFK Open Forum on the topic ‘New Cinema: Yesterday and Today’ here on Tuesday. “Then, it was also difficult to get a visa. Money was also scarce in the late 60s and early 70s,” Mr Kumaran said. The veteran was honoured at the Open Forum for his contributions to Malayalam cinema, which began with co-scripting the move that launched Malayalam New Wave, Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Swayamvaram. Kumar-an’s Athithi (1974) is considered one of the finest Indian movies ever made.
He said he became a filmmaker by compulsion. “I was too enthusiastic to assimilate many things to hold cinema as my sole passion. But the instinct for survival made me a filmmaker,” Kumaran said. But, in his own words, “luck was evasive”. After Athithi it took almost a decade for Kumaran to make his second film Rukmini, which came out in 1983 to widespread critical acclaim. After Rukmini Kumaran had decided to stop making films. “It is impossible for Indian filmmakers from an ordinary background to continue making films. He is not free to make films,” he said.
