Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s movie Ozhivu Divasathe Kali has bagged the FIPRESCI Award for the Best Malayalam Film in the just concluded 20th edition of IFFK.
Sanal talks about the making of his movie.
“More than a director, I was a chronicler of the socio-political inter-dynamics that plays out between a cross-section of people in a definite timeframe,” is how Sanal likes to describe his second outing as a filmmaker.
His movie “An Off-Day Game” (Ozhivu Divasathe Kali) won the FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) award for the Best Malayalam Film in the just concluded International Film Festival of Kerala held in Thiruvananthapuram.
The movie zeroes in on five friends who decide to indulge in some inebriated -apparently harmless- pastimes on an off-day.
How even the most spontaneous acts seem to be propelled by deep-seated social and casteist prejudices among ordinary people, form the crux of the movie.
Sanal says he was more of a mentor to the actors rather than directing them into a pre-defined space in a script. Since he did not want to interfere with the organic nature of the interaction between his actors, he first and foremost decided to do away with the script itself.
Dialogues were improvised and performed within a broad framework of reference for all scenes. Each shot was deliberately lengthened so as to capture the realistic flow of everyday living.
As a director, Sanal preferred to maintain a detached stance while shooting in order to avoid editing of the shots, thereby enabling him to capture his actors in their unaffected response to an unforeseen circumstance.
All he attempted to do was to bring out the latent socio-political prejudices that gradually crystallize in a human and have a tendency to come out in unexpected places and ways.
So even if the buddy gang filmed in the movie comprises a cross-section of Malayalis, the human response captured through the movie tends to be universal, Sanal opines.
An opinion amply justified by the enthusiastic response from the IFFK audience.
Incidentally, his debut venture “Oraalpokkam” (Six-feet High) had bagged him the Best Director Award in the 2014 Kerala State Film Awards.