Don Palathara’s period movie selected for Film Bazaar

The global spotlight will shine once again on city-based filmmaker Don Palathara and his latest film 1956, Central Travancore. It has become one of the two Malayalam films to earn a place in the 'Film Bazaar Recommends' section held along side the 50th International Film Festival of India in Goa later this month.

The 94-minute-long black and white film, written, directed and edited by Mr. Palathara, and involving a small crew of 25 persons, is one among 26 feature films recommended for screening at Film Bazaar. The film, recommended from out of 200 submissions, will be shown to international film festival programmers and world sales agents – a viewing that Mr. Palathara hopes will take the film to other festivals and pave the way for collaboration with international producers, cast and crew members.

While the filmmaker’s earlier works,

Shavam and

Vith , were acclaimed but not released commercially, Mr. Palathara will submit

1956, Central Travancore for the Censor Board’s certification and release it in theatres.

Mr. Palathara, known to work with shoestring budgets and new actors, shot most of the period film in Idukki earlier this year over 16 days. But the film deviates from his earlier works since parts of it were shot on set and this was the first time that Mr. Palathara worked with a producer, Abhilash S. Kumar.

It is set in the period that preceded the land reform bills, against the backdrop of migrations to Idukki’s forested land from parts of Central Travancore. Mr. Palathara calls it an “anthropological film” that documents the trials of migration, and the relationship between two brothers, who along with four others, set off on a hunting trip.

The filmmaker, who is from Idukki, drew from stories that his grandparents told him of life in the 1950s.