The Hindu : Kerala / Thiruvananthapuram News : Not a first attempt to focus on women: Adoor

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Thursday, Nov 01, 2007
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Not a first attempt to focus on women: Adoor

Special Correspondent

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: While making a film on the basis of a short-story or a novel, it need not be faithful to the original version, filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan has said.

He was speaking at a meet-the press programme organised by the Press Club here on Wednesday.

Adoor said a faithful depiction would only produce a bad copy. He said he changed the original version and developed the plot to suit the medium. A transformation from the print to the visual medium demanded an organic change.

‘Naalu Penungal,’ Adoor’s latest venture, depicts the plight of women in Kerala in spite of the social changes that swept the State. It deals with the romance of a prostitute, the plight of a newly wed farmhand, a childless housewife and a spinster. The four independent stories present a cross-section of the social life in the erstwhile Travancore. Even after Independence, the living conditions of the people remain unchanged.

Recreating the details of a particular period was a real challenge, but it has been done meticulously since the film is a social documentation too. When the film was premiered in the masters’ section at the Toronto film festival, 80 per cent of the audience comprised women. They watched the film in rapt attention and it received rave reviews too. The differences in culture were not an impediment. They could sense the message.

Adoor asserted that all his films, including ‘Swayamwaram,’ ‘Kodiyettam,’ ‘Kathapurushan’ and ‘Mathilukal,’ gave due importance to women characters and ‘Naalu Penungal’ alone could not be dubbed as his first attempt to focus on women. Women should see and enjoy films that deviated from the conventional mode, he said.

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