Making of environmental films should begin from close observation of nature and a genuine concern for its wellbeing, filmmaker K.P. Kumaran has said.
He was delivering the keynote address at the inaugural ceremony of a two-day workshop on script-writing for environmental films, jointly organised by the State Institute of Languages and the Directorate of Environment and Climate Change, at Nalanda Hall here on Thursday. Mr. Kumaran said that a fair sense of geography and history also was essential for a person before he embarked on making movies conveying environmental concerns.
He said that each person was contributing to environmental pollution. World War II was one of the major assaults given by man to the environment. “A number of films have effectively convinced him (man) the breadth and depth of what he had done to his environment through that war,” he said.
Mr. Kumaran said it was an irony that even the representatives of the so-called progressive political parties and mainstream religions, who were expected to be in the forefront for protecting the environment, were often keeping mum or siding with nature’s assailants.
Noted environmental filmmaker P. Balan, who interacted with the participants of the workshop before screening his ‘Green Oscar’ winning documentary ‘The Eighteenth elephant — Three Monologues,’ which brought to focus the harrowing lives of captive elephants in the State, said that the “callousness” shown by the “insensitive” Keralites to the environment was the most disturbing vulgarities of the modern times.
