IFFK Day-1 Evening

IFFK Day-1 Evening

Whisky: A heady concentrate of film art

Whisky was the most sought after film today. And the Uruguayan film fully lived up to the expectations. As one wag wryly commented, “it is not whisky, but a hard rum of a film, too hard to swallow at one go”. The plot unfolds in a very slow pace. The film is about the life of a habitual loser who runs a socks manufacturing firm. His brother, who runs a successful firm in Brazil, is about visit him for participating in a funeral-related function of their mother. Just for the sake of vanity or for hiding his social failure, the protagonist asks one of his employees to act as his wife, who obliges with great expectations. But more than the storyline, what captivates the audience is the harmony of the visuals and the nature of the characters. The quality of the film demands a broad review than a mere blog entry.

As a whole the first day was satisfying: two good films against one rank bad one. Not that there are no problems. Trivandrum has become the pollution capital of Kerala. The traffic here is as cumbersome to negotiate as any pseudo-intellectual film is to understand. But moving from one theatre to another under the harsh sun is also quite tiresome.


Tomorrow I am going to see Havana Blues directed by Spanish director Benito Zambrano. The director claims the film is “a truthful enough representation of that extraordinary place [Cuba] which so often led to cliched representations”. Then I think I will either watch C.R.A.Z.Y. in Kripa theatre or Rock That Flies in Kalabhavan. Don’t find much about these films. I will google these films and then decide. But I don’t have any doubt about which film to see in the afternoon. It is The Wind That Shakes The Barley by Ken Loach. It has won the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. The film is a different take on Irish civil war during the 1920s.