Watching child after child gather into a group of 11, chattering, swinging a bat and tossing a ball around, can be such a heart-warming picture. They walk in and out of each other’s homes, bring out parts of a cricketing kit split between them and stride towards the only open field they knew was big enough to play. The scene is from a Malayalam film, Madappally United, yet to release, but which has gone to many film festivals across the world and won awards too. It manages to be sweet, telling and entirely genuine, just by letting children be children, and subtly giving out a wake-up call to a pressing issue.
Ajay Govind, the filmmaker who happened to be at a crematorium in Dehradun once, and watched a group of village children coming there to play, had quietly built an idea in his mind for a movie. Those children had to leave that day, without being able to play, and Ajay mused about the fates of so many kids in India without enough public playgrounds. “I had the idea for the film, but I didn’t know if I was going to make it in Hindi or Malayalam,” says Ajay, who has worked in both languages. He has made After The Third Bell, a Hindi murder mystery, directed music videos and short films in Hindi and Malayalam. Born and raised in Delhi, his first Malayalam feature happened in 2019 when he stayed in Kerala and made an anthology of short films called Jump Cuts.
That year, he also made a documentary in Madappally – a small town in Vadakara of Kozhikode district – and interacted with a lot of students at the government school. “I felt this spark. The children were very confident in front of the camera, and quite comfortable in speaking with us – some members in my team were not even Malayalis. The confidence they showed led to the making of Madappally United,” Ajay says.
Watch: During a screening of Madappally United
All the children who acted in the film are from Madappally Government School, chosen after an audition, with the help of actor and casting director Rajesh Madhavan. There’s something about the easy camaraderie of schoolchildren and the niceties exchanged between the village folk that makes you want to smile through the whole story.
Ajay points out how, with children, there hardly are any obstacles, because the minute they run into one, they just walk away and find another way around. The children he saw at Dehradun hardly put up a fight when the guard at the gate told them they can’t play there anymore. “It is different with adults,” he says. He has added that very fittingly into his script.
Parallel with the long walk of the children towards their ground (and this is not a boring episode at all, it is full of engaging and hilarious conversations), the film shows another conflict, handled poorly by the adults. Srikant Murali, who plays advocate Prakash, visiting the Madappally school, his alma mater, is drawn into a conflict when the people who promised a community centre for the kids, back out and insist on building a mall instead. Words are thrown back and forth between Prakash and the men who trouble him through persistent phone calls.
Srikant Murali and Savithri Sreedharan in the film
We also see through Prakash’s son, a more privileged child, surprised that kids at the government school don’t have proper cricketing gear and some don’t even have shoes to wear. The kids at the government school come from different backgrounds – the script has nicely merged in bits from their homes without losing touch of the main plot. You see a kid with a father in the Gulf, another hurriedly washing clothes before leaving the house, a third having to help his dad with fishing and so on.
Ajay knew that a sports film needn’t be only about the actual sport, it can also be the journey towards the game, exciting and with new stories unravelling along the way. Many of the conversations in the script came from the things kids said during the months they had a workshop before the film. “In the script is a story that one child gives, about not being able to watch a film on TV, because every time it is played the adults are reminded of someone who watched it and passed away on his way home from the theatre. Part of it is from an anecdote a child mentioned at the workshop. All of this is not specific to one place. When we took the film to festivals in other parts of the world – be it the US or Kenya – people told us that they could relate to it. It is a very universal story,” Ajay says.
Understandably, yes. Sports or anything extracurricular has always been reduced to “unnecessary side-tracks” in a student’s life, no matter how one excelled in it, or desired for it. Diminishing public playgrounds too, are another reality.
Ajay with casting director and actor Rajesh Madhavan
It is also admirable that Ajay got into the shoes of young girls, most often deprived of a chance to play cricket in schools, because it is often considered a sport of boys or men. In his cricket team of 11 are four girls, enthusiastically walking out of their homes with gloves and helmet, often leaving behind a complaining parent who cannot understand how girls can play cricket. “To be honest, my original idea was to have a group of boys, like the one I saw in Dehradun. But at the school, I learnt that whenever there was an event, the girls at the school were more keen to participate in them. I gathered it is because boys don’t have to go seeking opportunities, it will come to them. But for girls, it was not the same story. I also learnt that this changed in college time, and girls became more subdued,” Ajay says.
He, of course, had the insights shared by his co-writer Shahina K Rafique. Rajesh Madhavan gave another piece of advice – to not burden the children with too much information. So the kids just knew their part when they acted, not what happened in the rest of the script, not even which actors were in the film. “When they saw Harish Peradi in the crematorium, they asked excitedly, ‘oh so we are acting in a big film’?” Ajay says, clearly fond of the cast he nurtured.Savithri Sreedharan also plays an important role.
The film is expected to have a theatrical release in July.
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