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Showing posts from July, 2018

224. Indian director Rahul Jain’s debut, long-documentary film “Machines” (2016): Hard-hitting and real perspective of modern India

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I ndia produces some of the world’s most attractive textiles that contribute to making lives in India and elsewhere colourful and comfortable-- whether it be the clothes one wears or the cloth-based furnishings in one’s dwellings. Few realize the oppressive conditions in which textile printing workers in India toil to make the lives of billions of diverse people across the world happy and content. Machines and human beings together contribute to those lovely printed textiles. The contribution of human beings in the process is rarely in the limelight. Toiling within dingy factories, these human beings gradually become dehumanized and mechanical in their actions in their sheer desperation to earn a regular income to keep themselves afloat above the abject line of hunger and poverty. They become machines not out of choice but more from a lack of choice. Film director Rahul Jain’s honest perspective is not focussed on the machines that manufacture and print the textiles but more on the fac...

223. Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 12th feature film “Sandome no satsujin” (The Third Murder) (2017): An amazing script and film less about a murder but more about why murders are committed and what is truth, presented by re-working the Rashomon principle.

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M ore than half a century ago the Japanese maestro Akira Kurosawa made a classic film Rashomon (1950) about a samurai’s death and the rape of the samurai’s wife.  Different versions of what transpired are narrated by different characters. Each version made the viewer ponder over which version indeed was the truth and why each personality concocted their own twisted perspective of the truth. Many filmgoers would be convinced the tale belonged to director Kurosawa but Kurosawa had merely adapted a tale written by the “father of the Japanese short story”—Ryunosuke Akutagawa for the screen, with considerable help from Kurosawa’s trusted scriptwriter Shinobu Hashimoto, who contributed significantly to six of Kurosawa’s most famous works, including the original story of Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952). Nearly seven decades later, another Japanese director gives us a more complex film on similar lines to unravel the truth about a killing—with a major difference.   Unlike Kurosawa’s famous fi...