The historic protest of Indian farmers in 2020-21 against the three farm laws enacted by the Union government had inspired some remarkable documentaries, which have been showcased in the past editions of the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK). This year’s edition features a documentary that looks at the whole issue from a different angle, through the lens of history, not learning which we are doomed to repeat.
Scientist-turned-filmmaker Bedabrata Pain’s Deja Vu, being screened in the Long Documentary Competition category, takes us on a 10,000 km road trip through the heart of America to find out who benefited and who lost out following similar market reforms enacted in the agricultural sector in the U.S. in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. What emerges from the travels are farming families which have fallen into ruins, abandoned villages and massive tracts of lands that belonged to countless farmers now in the possession of a handful of corporations.
Bedabrata Pain
Farmer suicides in the U.S.
In a desolate village in Wisconsin, the team meets a dairy farmer who was forced to sell a farm which his family has been farming for 150 years. One of the most shocking facts revealed in the documentary is the number of farmer suicides in the U.S., of which not much is often heard of. In fact, it is this aspect which struck the filmmaker when he began researching for the film in 2021.
“Because I live in the U.S. half of the time, there was much confusion when the farm protests began in India. I started reading up to find out whether there is any truth to what the economists are claiming about farm sector prosperity through these reforms. The first thing I came across was the large number of farm suicides in the U.S. When we started travelling for the documentary, the devastation that we witnessed was not just economic, but of entire lifestyles that disappeared. This change we tried to capture started happening during Reagan’s time, after the reforms. By the end of the journey, it became very clear that what India is trying to do has happened in America, destroying the entire sector,” says Mr. Pain in an interview to The Hindu.
The story is the same in the grain, dairy and the livestock sectors that the documentary covers, with big corporations coming in and pushing everyone else out. He says almost every farmer they met had someone in the family who committed suicide. The documentary manages a delicate balance between stories that moves us and data that shocks us.
“Even though the reforms come under the rubric of the free market, it is actually a corporate market. We wanted to make a movie that would make people think as to why this process is happening. Getting the balance right between thinking and feeling took me a lot of time,” he says.
Mr. Pain, who was part of the NASA team that invented the CMOS digital image sensor technology used in digital cameras and mobile phones, holds over 90 patents. In 2012, he made his feature film debut with acclaimed work Chittagong.
“My interest is in a large number of things. I think in today’s world you are boxed into specific areas and are asked to go deeper into it. I consciously made the decision that I will not be doing the same thing all my life,” he says.
Three-fourths of the way into Thalavara, one realises that we don’t know the name of Arjun Ashokan’s character. Jyothish’s childhood friends have forgotten, as they mostly call him ‘paand’ or ‘paandan’ (paand is loosely used to refer to vitiligo in Malayalam). Thalavara tugs at the heartstrings in unexpected little ways, gives hope, and, by the end of the film, leaves you a little teary-eyed. Director Akhil Anilkumar’s portrayal is sensitive and nuanced.
Yes, the story is about a person with vitiligo, but the condition is not at the centre of the story. The film is more about Jyothish and how he overcomes, or at least learns to deal with, some of the emotional baggage caused by it. His redemption arc (from self-consciousness towards self-acceptance) is engagingly portrayed.
Also, Thalavara is the story of a young man chasing the cinema dream and how vitiligo and others’ perception of it pose challenges. Because, ironically, showbiz is all about appearances, or so we think. He faces, what one assumes are, the struggles someone with his background faces — unemployment, financial troubles, and family problems — while trying to make a career in films. The messaging is that there are all kinds of people in the film industry, but, obviously, the good folks sometimes win.
Nobody in Jyothish’s life — family or friends — mentions the vitiligo overtly until push comes to shove, when their cruelty (words) comes gushing forth. Others’ awareness of it is ever-present, just like the white patches on his skin cannot be ignored. When, towards the end of the film, Jyothish asserts his desire to act in films, his mother asks him how he thinks he would make it with his condition. That is the unkindest cut, which breaks his heart. Even then, he is used to being taunted, and taking offense is a luxury.
Jyothish lives in Palakkad with his family in a low-income locality, in a house that his mother often compares to a kennel. His father, essayed brilliantly by veteran actor Ashokan, has lost all his money chasing the cinema dream. Understandably, his mother, Ashamma, a brilliant portrayal by Devadarshini, cannot tolerate another film-obsessed family member. His constants are his four friends with whom he hangs out when he is not working.
Story: How a man overcomes challenges posed by vitiligo and realises his dream of becoming an actor.
The story picks up when a new tenant and her mother move into the house of one of his friends. Sandhya (Revathy Sharma), a Tamilian-Malayali, becomes the object of the preoccupation of all the friends (a la In Harihar Nagar and a bunch of other Malayalam films) except for Jyothish, because he knows he does not stand a chance because of his skin. His friends consider him ‘safe’ to be the go-between for them and Sandhya. No spoilers here about who Sandhya falls in love with! And Revathy impresses as a sassy Sandhya who knows exactly what, or rather whom, she wants.
Jyothish’s micro actions point to his self-esteem issues — his dislike of being photographed by others because he cannot manipulate the images with filters as he does with his selfies, and his full-sleeved clothing, for instance. Or how he frowns when Sandhya picks a panda plushie, perhaps, is a reminder of his condition? These details enhance the storytelling.
Jyothish is one of Arjun Ashokan’s honest performances. He reflects the quiet diffidence of someone uncomfortable with the attention he gets for his appearance. Ashokan shines as Jyothish’s cinema-obsessed father, who is kind and easy-going. The relationship between the older couple is sweet, despite Ashamma’s annoyance at her husband’s undying love of cinema.
To Akhil’s credit, he has managed to elicit the best out of his entire cast of actors. They have understood the brief and delivered honest performances. The character arc of the main characters and their journey towards transformation are well-etched.
Some of the exchanges are laugh-out-loud funny for the realism of it. For example, the look on Sandhya’s father’s face when Jyothish informs him of his intentions of becoming an actor – priceless!
Akhil Anilkumar, who co-wrote and directed Archana 31 Not Out and one of the segments in Freedom Fight, has tried to keep the narrative taut at 120-odd minutes. Certain writing/editing decisions could have kept the film tight. His co-writer on this project is Appu Aslam. Given the story, there is scope for an inclusivity sermon, but Akhil does not indulge and shows restraint. The music, composed by Electronic Kili, is soulful.
The make-up, which is inconsistent and jarring, is the only let-down in the movie. The vitiligo patches change shape and size, as does the grey patch in Jyothish’s hair. The make-up team could have spent some time researching for a better output.
But otherwise, Thalavara is a sweet film like the family dramas of the past, where the good guy eventually wins. Of course, if you are looking for deep intellectual insights into the psyche of a person with vitiligo, you are at the wrong place. A library might be a better place.
A postscript — when Mahesh Narayanan presents a movie, expectations are bound to be high, and Thalavara delivers.
I vividly remember my late father calling me every time a Rajinikanth song played on TV. Somehow, even though much from that age is a blur, I recollect the excitement with which I would run to pick up a black coat with big white buttons on it — that was the closest I had to the ones the star wore in Baashhaand Padayappa. I had to put on my ‘Rajini jacket,’ grab sunglasses, and dance in front of my ever-encouraging audience. It felt like an experience uniquely my own — at least until I grew up and realised that Superstar Rajinikanth is a phenomenon who peddled dreams, instilled hope, and defined style to millions, a journey now spanning 50 years.
For actor Manikandan K (of Jai Bhim, Good Night and Lover fame), the spell was cast quite early as well, by a shot of Rajini lighting up a matchstick with nothing but his gaze. “At that age — I must have been three or four — I believed that maybe Rajini sir could really light up things by just looking at them. He had the charisma to sell that illusion to a child. But Rajini sir’s greatness lies in this: Sivaji released when I was studying in college, and even in that film, there’s a shot in a song where he returns a bullet shot at him by merely looking at it. And even after growing up, I enjoyed that a lot.”
Smoking is integral in Rajini’s arsenal of style statements; from Moondru Mudichu to the recently released Coolie, only he could make a vice look that cool. Even school children used to roll sheets of paper to emulate his iconic cigarette flip (throwing and catching it smoothly between the lips). This, of course, has had its own share of criticism, as it allegedly incited youth to start smoking.
“Look, ‘Rajinism’ came to be because youngsters saw themselves in Rajinikanth — he was a dark-skinned man who instilled self-esteem in young southern Indian men. He was the hero they could be. The flipside was that many, like myself, picked up smoking along with everything else,” says 40-year-old Erode-based auditor and an ardent fan, Narendar B, adding that perhaps he should have considered the star’s no-smoking advice.
“I don’t smoke, but I used to do the cigarette flip with pencils when I was in school. You can’t flip a full-sized pencil, obviously, so I’d wait till it reaches the right size to do it,” reminisces Sathyakumaran G, a 36-year-old Chennai-based software engineer and a diehard fan. Rajinikanth’s iconic sunglass flip captivated Sathyakumaran. “Whenever a film releases, I would somehow buy the sunglasses in the shape that he wears in that film, and click some 10 pictures wearing them. I used to perform his sunglass flip well when I was about 9 or 10 years old, and even now, I do it to show off to my children,” he adds.
It is not mere luck that an actor’s name has become a style statement by itself — even ‘style’ looks much cooler with ‘Rajini’ as a prefix. From how he opens a bottle of cola (like in a rare commercial for the government-owned cola product Palm Cola), the way he pops bubble gum, to something as ordinary as pulling the coats to slip hands into pockets, or simply walking, Rajinikanth has often shown an instinct for turning even the simplest acts into something larger-than-life. But the aura of the superstar is not just about the cigarette-flips and sunglasses. He single-handedly influenced how Tamil men, and possibly even women, dressed and carried themselves.
Rajinikanth and Jayalakshmi in a still from ’Mullum Malarum’
Rajinikanth and Jayalakshmi in a still from ’Mullum Malarum’
Jaishankar and Rajinikanth in ‘Murattu Kalai’
Sumithra, Sivakumar and Rajinikanth in a still from ‘Bhuvana oru Kelvi Kuri’
Rajinikanth and Ambika in a still from ‘Naan Sigappu Manithan’
Rajinikanth in a still from ‘Bairavi’
Rajinikanth and Shoba in a still from ‘Thee’
Rajinikanth and Sridevi in a still from ‘Chaal Baaz’
Rajinikanth and Manjula in a still from ‘Kuppathu Raja’
Rajinikanth and Amala in a still from ‘Maapillai’
Rajinikanth and Jayalakshmi in a still from ’Mullum Malarum’
Rajinikanth with Meena and Roja in ‘Veera’
Rajinikanth with K Balachander on the sets of ‘Thillu Mullu’
Rajinikanth and Madhavi in ‘Un Kannil Neer Vazhinthal’
Rajinikanth and Sripriya in ‘Thai Meethu Sathyam’
Rajinikanth and Saritha in ‘Thappu Thaalangal’
Rajinikanth, Sripriya and Gokulnath in ‘En Kelvikku Enna Badhil’
Rajinikanth and Manjula in ‘Kurinji Malar’
Rajinikanth and Radha in ‘Sivappu Suriyan’
Rajinikanth and Sridevi in ‘Priya’
Rajinikanth with Anuradha (now Anuradha Sriram) and Khaja Sheriff in ‘Kaali’
Rajinikanth and Raghuvaran in ‘Mister Bharat’
Rajinikanth and Radhika in ‘Nallavanukku Nallavan’
Rajinikanth and Pramila in ‘Chaturangam’
Rajinikanth with Madhavi in the Tamil film ‘Thillu Mullu’
Rajinikanth with Sujatha in ‘Avargal’
Rajinikanth with Nathiya in ‘Rajathi Raja’
Rajinikanth with Jothi in ‘Pudhukavithai’
Rajinikanth with Gouthami and Chinni Jayanth in ‘Raja Chinna Roja’
Rajinikanth with Lakshmi in ‘Netrikan’
Rajinikanth and Mammootty in a still from ‘Thalapathi’
Rajinikanth and K.S. Ravikumar in ‘Padayappa’
1/3
Rajinikanth, the trendsetter: ‘Stylelu stylelu thaan, ithu super stylelu thaan’
Even today, the star’s many outfits from the ‘80s remain chic and contemporary. Sathyakumaran reminisces about a T-shirt the star wore in the double-action film Johnny, which features arguably one of the most charming on-screen Rajinis. “He wore a T-shirt that reads ‘Music The Life Giver’ with a denim jacket. In a specific scene, wearing a white overcoat, he lit a cigarette while leaning on a pillar. Be it that pipe, the thick-framed glasses, or the hairstyle he opted for… he looked so elegant.”
Speaking of hairstyles, Manikandan reminds us of how the star carried off his centre-parting. “The song ‘Rajavukku Raja Naan Thaan’ comes to mind. Also, he was so handsome in the ‘Malayala Karayoram’ song from Rajadhi Raja; in fact, that is his best look in my opinion,” says the actor. Narendar says he still flips his hair back the way Rajini did in countless films. “It’s so ingrained. There’s this staple Rajini hairstyle that is so hard to maintain but looks slick on thalaivar,” says the fan.
Rajinikanth in stills from ‘Rajadhi Raja’
Many on-screen outfits have become local fads. ”In Padayappa, he wore a pair of jeans that had pockets near the knees. My family bought those jeans for me. I remember wearing it to school on that one day that we were allowed to coloured clothes,” recollects Manikandan.
The star’s denim outfits, worn in films like Uzhaippali and Raja Chinna Roja, seem to have a fandom on their own. “Also, there’s a photoshoot of a clean-shaven thalaivar wearing denim — he looked so dapper in it. He didn’t recreate that look in any of his films,” points out Sathyakumaran.
Costume designer Praveen Raja, who styled the superstar in his latest film Coolie, agrees that there is something special about how a denim-on-denim outfit rests on Rajini. “The first thing we shot was the poster in which he wears a denim-on-denim. Director Lokesh Kanagaraj’s gist for me was that the look had to emulate Thalapathy — that it had to be a slipper, a denim, and a shirt.” The denim look in Padayappa, Praveen adds, is his personal favourite of the superstar.
A few of Rajinikanth’s denim outfits over the years
Interestingly, denim has taken over theatres in Tamil Nadu ever since Coolie released on August 14 — all thanks to Anirudh Ravichander’s ‘Chikutu,’ a T Rajendar-styled earworm that features Rajini in a denim-on-denim. “Right from the day the song was released, people began to wear denim-on-denim outfits. Later, after the audio launch, I saw many wearing that outfit. Even Lokesh wore denim-on-denim for the interviews during the film’s promotion,” says Praveen, who was elated by how even the ‘Coolie badge’ from the film has become a part of the ensemble audiences wear to watch Coolie.
A fan of superstar Rajinikanth ties an armband to another while celebrating the release of the actor’s new film ‘Coolie’, outside a movie theatre in Chennai, Thursday, Aug. 14, 2025
| Photo Credit:
R SENTHILKUMAR
Praveen Raja on designing Rajinikanth’s looks in ‘Coolie’
“The colours had to blend for every scene. We picked black, maroon and olive as the necessities; apart from that, we chose fuchsia red for many montage sequences. For the de-ageing sequence, we didn’t want to give him a basic violet shirt. He wore the body suit we made for him — because he had to look young — and he wore the shirt on top, and he felt confident. He said, ‘I look young and strong now.’ In fact, he asked if he could wear it and go outside. I said, ‘No, sir, because it’s a tight fit and you can’t sit.’ The typical violet from Thee is what we dyed for everyone who acted in that scene. When it comes to the Coolie badge, we didn’t want to repeat the badge from Thee, so we made it slightly bigger. We couldn’t predict the fabric they had used for the badges in Thee. This time, we used an alloy of metals. We made two or three options weight-wise. We made the texture in a way that it blends with sir’s arms, and we had it curved because it had to fit his arms, which are thinner now.”
Padayappa also featured one of the many times the superstar has donned an oversized jacket. “The denim shirt, the printed shirt, and that dark blazer that he wore in the ‘Kikku Yerudhey’ song were all trendsetting,” Praveen says. He grew up watching the star wear oversized jackets in films like Mannan and Rajadhi Raja. “In fact, we tried the oversized fit in Coolie — for the denim shirt you see in the photoshoot with the watches.”
Sathyakumar gets nostalgic about the white overalls from Padayappa. “He paired it with a brown shawl. There are many films, like Manithan and Arunachalam, in which he looks so charismatic in white-and-white,” says the fan, mentioning how a specific T-shirt from Pandian became a popular fad. “It was a plain T-shirt with a tick mark” — many outfits in the film featured a tick — “As a child, I used to wear that shirt, despite it being oversized.”
Baba, though being a forgettable outing for the superstar, found a special place among fans for thalaivar’s looks. “We started wearing a lot of light blue shirts with black pants after Baba. The headband also became a trend; whenever we came across a red towel, we would tie it on our heads and click pictures,” says Sathyakumaran.
Rajinikanth in ‘Pandian’, ‘Baba’, and ‘Padayappa’
Rajini also glamorised the big boots that had you tuck in the pants. The white shoes in Annaamalai, the thundu he wears around his waist in Muthu, and the iconic scarf he dons in Thalapathy were all special looks that became a trend in the ‘90s Tamil Nadu, say fans.
Understanding Rajinism: Born talent, or a skill learned from sheer perseverance?
Even after 50 years since his debut, the mystique of Rajinikanth still puzzles many, for the silver screen is yet to see a star with such grace, swag, and original ideas. “Perhaps there may never come a star in Tamil with mannerisms that aren’t inspired by Rajini sir,” says Narendar.
Is this talent he was born with? Manikandan disagrees. “Like the Duryodhana incident (about how he had to improvise to make the ‘Mahabharata’ character look menacing on stage) that he recited at the audio launch of Jailer, it all comes down to one philosophy that he staunchly follows — to do things differently. Walking is a mundane thing, but with Rajini sir, it looks different,” says the actor who shared screen with the superstar in Kaala. “That’s a talent he got from years of practice. He questions why something is done a certain way and tries to change it, but he won’t do that just for the sake of doing something different; he effortlessly convinces you,” says Manikandan. He explains how the superstar told him about the many hours that had gone into perfecting his signature cigarette flip.
Sathyakumaran and Narendar remind us of the several instances where Rajini credited late legendary Sivaji Ganesan as an inspiration. “The swiftness was, of course, natural to thalaivar. In fact, Sivaji had made smoking look stylish in many films. Sivaji sir used to do it slowly, but our thalaivar is quite fast,” says Sathyakumaran.
From how Praveen describes his experience working with the star, you get the sense of a man who wishes to redefine himself, even at 74. “He is still in his styling era. He knows what’s running in the trends. To date, whatever you give him, he will wear it and stand in front of the mirror. He will do the standing pose and see how it feels when he moves; only if he is confident, he will say, ‘Let’s proceed.’”
Praveen Raja with Rajinikanth
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
Praveen Raja on designing the two crucial scenes featuring Rajinikanth and Nagarjuna in ‘Coolie’:
“We wanted Nagarjuna sir’s costumes to be off-white, because it’s a mining area and there will be a splash of colours in his office. For Rajini sir, we didn’t want to go for black, since it’s night, or white; so we went for grey. It was also because the scene had warm light. Thankfully, it worked out well, even from a continuity perspective. Lokesh, of course, loves DC’s Joker, and so he wanted a purple colour suit for Nag sir. We didn’t want to repeat the mustard yellow, green and purple. However, the purple suit wouldn’t work with any other colour, so we opted for a purple-on-purple tone. For the bottom, I gave a nice pleated off-white baggy pants because the purple had to pop, and there had to be a good contrast between the top and bottom.”
Now, 50 years after his debut, Rajinikanth still has impact on our wardrobes. Watching fans dress up for Coolie, I think about why that ‘Rajini jacket’ meant so much to me — and I realise I did not just emulate him to look cool. He was one of my first heroes. Teenagers insecure about their looks need a role model to teach them swag, self-assurance and the sense that they are worthy of love. Just putting on my Rajini jacket gave me that confidence. As they say, “thalaivar nirandharam” — this legacy is for all eternity.
Horror films live or die on the bad decisions of their characters. The Philippou brothers understand this better than most. In their terrific debut, Talk to Me, teenagers treated a cursed embalmed hand as a party trick. It was youthful bravado in its purest, stupidest form. Their follow-up, Bring Her Back, is also built on bad decisions, but these were the kind made by people too young to know better and by adults who should know better, which is precisely what makes it unbearable to watch. Evil, even.
The film opens with a jolt of grainy VHS footage that depicts some sort of snuff tape-séance ritual taking place with bodies dangling, faces mangled and children’s voices shrieking with glee or terror, hard to tell which. The footage recurs throughout the film like a bad memory, and the Philippous let it fester, unresolved.
Bring Her Back (English)
Director: Danny and Michael Philippou
Cast: Sally Hawkins, Billy Barratt, Sora Wong, Jonah Wren Phillips
Runtime: 104 minutes
Storyline: A brother and sister witness a terrifying ritual at the secluded home of their new foster mother
Andy (Billy Barratt), seventeen and still carrying the scars of his father’s abuse, comes home one afternoon with his half-sister Piper (Sora Wong), who is legally blind, to find their father dead in the shower. With adulthood just months away, Andy is determined to become Piper’s guardian. Meanwhile the child services see only two vulnerable minors, and hand them over to Laura (Sally Hawkins), a creepy, foster mother.
We know Hawkins better from the warmth of her eccentricities, like the gentle cleaner in The Shape of Water and the twinkly Mrs. Brown in Paddington. Here, she turns that warmth inside out. Laura smothers Piper with affection, insisting that she and her dead daughter are “the same,” while insidiously undermining Andy at every turn. She spikes the kids with booze, stages manic midnight trauma-dump dance parties, and humiliates Andy in ways designed to erode his sense of self. But the cruelty isn’t grandiose or gothic. It’s intimate and domestic, and therefore so much more excruciating.
A still from ‘Bring Her Back’
| Photo Credit:
A24
Barratt plays Andy with a jittery defensiveness, convinced that if he can just survive the next three months he can save his sister. Wong, in her first role, has a natural, watchful stillness that makes Piper’s gullibility feel earned, but her moments of cunning, all the more impressive. And though their bond is the film’s fragile core, it’s Hawkins who dominates the screen. She plays Laura as a monster in hiding, but also makes her monstrosity obvious enough to make us squirm.
But Jonah Wren Phillips is the film’s revelation, whose mute foster child Oliver’s creeping presence colonises every corner. With his blank scowl, bruised eye, and almost angelic androgyny, Phillips gives one of those rare child performances that feel instantly etched into the horror canon. This disturbing brand of non-cooperation recalls Linda Blair or Harvey Stephens and secures Phillips as a horror all-timer before his voice has even broken.
The Philippous use the house’s cavernous rooms and drained swimming pool like psychological traps, like spaces that seem designed to unmoor the children. Rain seeps into everything, from the tiles, to the furniture, to the air; until the entire film feels waterlogged. Their flashy visual language of needle drops and camera spins has shifted since Talk to Me. The focus now is on viscous textures of blood, drool, piss, rainwater staining every frame.
What saves Bring Her Back from collapsing under its own cruelty is the Philippous’ perverse fidelity to the physical. This is a masterclass in staging the indignities of the body. Blood is a sticky, congealing mess, while drool clings to lips and piss stains fabric. The sound design doubles down on these corporeal violations with bones protesting, knives worrying their way through flesh, and teeth detonating like porcelain. These effects owe nothing to the slick sadism of torture porn and everything to the clammy tactility of J-horror. They infest you, crawling under your skin with the intent to stay there.
What distinguishes Bring Her Back from so much of contemporary horror is how the Philippous refuse to outsource this sick, twisted evil to metaphor. The genre has become fluent in allegory, and by contrast, the Philippous place us in the thick of it. Laura’s manipulation of Andy and Piper is not a stand-in for trauma, rather the trauma itself, unfolding in real time. These kids are devoid of any convenient vantage point or ironic safety buffer, so the complicity of watching them navigate the terrible bind of needing the love of someone who harms them, feels debilitating.
A still from ‘Bring Her Back’
| Photo Credit:
A24
The film is deliberately messy. Its dubious mythology of chalk circles, occult VHS footage, and voodoo locks of hair, never quite adds up as satisfyingly as it did in Weapons, earlier this month. But coherence isn’t the goal here, because the Philippous are chasing a series of sensations — like the sickening dread of being a child in the wrong house, or the anxiety-inducing uncertainty of whether an adult’s affection is protection or predation.
Bring Her Back is ultimately powered by Hawkins’s performance, in one of the great villain turns of recent horror. Laura feels as though kindness itself were a mask that could suffocate a child, and it’s terrifying because of how recognisably human it is. The film gnaws at that primal fear that children are defenceless against the very people entrusted with their care, even (and often, especially) in safety nets meant to protect them.
The Philippou brothers may not yet be the new kings of horror, but with Bring Her Back they’ve at least proven themselves its most sadistic purveyors of the decade — pushing us into yet another nightmare we’d rather not face and locking the door behind us.
These two films are a masterclass in Chinese storytelling — one plunges into the Lovecraftian world of eldritch nightmares, the other drifts through two decades of love and loss — here’s why Chinese anime series ‘Lord of Mysteries’ and Jia Zhangke’s ‘Caught by the Tides’ should be on your watch list
Actor Madhav Suresh, son of Union Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas and actor Suresh Gopi, was taken into police custody in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, on Thursday (August 21, 2025) night following a road rage altercation that also involved a Congress leader.
According to the Museum police, the confrontation began when the vehicles driven by Mr. Suresh and Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) member Vinod Krishna blocked each other while the latter attempted a U-turn.
Both drivers stopped their vehicles and engaged in a heated exchanged that lasted around 15 minutes. A video circulating on social media shows Mr. Suresh accusing Mr. Krishna of placing his arm on him and hitting his car. The footage also shows the actor slamming the bonnet of Mr. Krishna’s vehicle and blocking its path.
The police rushed to the scene on being informed by Mr. Krishna, who alleged that the actor was under the influence of alcohol. Mr. Suresh was subsequently taken into custody for a medical examination. He was transported in a police vehicle to the station, where he underwent a breath analyser test. The Congress leader too was summoned to the station for questioning.
While it later emerged that the actor had not consumed alcohol, the police mediated a discussion between both parties. Soon, Mr. Krishna submitted a written statement, declaring that he did not wish to pursue the matter further, an official said.
In the absence of a formal complaint, Mr. Suresh was released within a short while.
Pawan Kumar is an enterprising man. In 2012, when Kannada cinema was in dire need of a next-wave movement, he made the crowd-funded psychological thriller Lucia, which inspired several filmmakers to break the tried-and-tested formula in the industry. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Pawan launched the Filmmakers United Club (FUC). During a period when the film industry was staring at an uncertain future, the FUC ensured activities related to cinema, such as online film screenings and discussions, were sustained.
In 2023, he surprised everyone by pursuing farming, a move that came on the back of the debacle of his last directorial film, Dhoomam, starring Fahadh Faasil and produced by Hombale Films. Many felt it was his way of dealing with the Malayalam film’s failure. Pawan says he never thought of farming as a break from doing movies. “I can’t say I completely moved to farming. We bought a piece of land and I had to figure out what to do with it,” he says.
At the farm called Pasownas in Hullahalli near Mysuru, Pawan grows fruits and vegetables, and plants saplings. Having completed a permaculture design course, Pawan’s full-fledged involvement in farming meant that his ardent followers had to wait a bit longer for his return to cinema. The actor-filmmaker held a couple of filmmaking workshops against the picturesque backdrop of the farm. In one of his videos, he compared farmers to writers, calling them the fundamental origin of a quality product.
Keeping aside the comparison of farming with movies, Pawan notes, “You can live without films, but you can’t say the same about food. Farming has been an eye-opening experience. When I understood what goes into growing food, it was a huge lesson, and I persisted with farming. The process of working with nature is challenging and complex. You might come with a great plan, but three days of rain will offset everything. So I learnt to deal with such uncertainties.”
After a two-year hiatus, Pawan sprung a surprise by revealing that he was back in front of the camera. He plays the lead in Shodha, the upcoming Kannada ZEE5 original web series. Set to premiere on August 29, Shodha is reportedly adapted from the Hindi web series Khoj. Also starring Siri Ravikumar and Arun Sagar, Shodha is a psychological thriller about a man’s desperate search for his missing wife.
Pawan Kumar in the Kannada web series ‘Shodha’.
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
“The corporates have their reasons to not invest in Kannada. That’s why I was excited when I learnt that ZEE5 was keen on Kannada originals. If we don’t respond to such demands from the platforms, we will be stuck in a chicken-and-egg situation. I jumped into the project without even reading my contract. The acting bug in me is always alive,” he says.
Sunil Mysore (Orchestra Mysuru fame)is the director, while stand-up comedian Suhash Navarathna has written the script for Shodha. Pawan has been credited as a script doctor. “Even though I tried to be just an actor in the first couple of days on sets, my writer-director side would pop up without my knowledge. I suggested some tweaks to the narrative structure of Shodha, apart from revising certain lines in the script. I tried to elevate the existing material, and the entire team was okay with it,” explains Pawan.
Having directed the time-loop drama Kudi Yedamaithe for Aha and co-directed the Netflix dystopian drama Leila starring Huma Qureshi, Pawan isn’t new to the OTT space. The filmmaker confesses that he would want to explore the web series space. “A web series takes away the box office pressure. Today, apart from exceptions such as Tourist Familyand Su From So, films that are doing well are “event films” that are big on scale. My films are an intimate experience, and I approach scenes in a more niche manner compared to a ‘masala’ movie. In a web series, you can tell a story through multiple dimensions rather than following a template.”
Dhoomam, a thriller that addressed the ill effects of smoking,was Pawan’s first failure. With a popular production house (Hombale) and one of the country’s finest actors (Fahadh), the film looked like a sure-shot hit on paper. However, it stumbled at the box office. Pawan says the film’s result has left him a tad confused, though he now knows where he went wrong.
“Till the day of the release, I showed the film to so many people, including the producers and heads of some OTT platforms. All of them gave a positive response. I learnt that if out of 10 people, even if one person has a sharp criticism about your work, you must value him or her,” he says, adding he would have loved to make one change in the script.
“The video where Alfred Hitchcock talks about the ‘bomb moment’ is quite popular. He says that if two people are talking and there is a bomb under their table, you must show the bomb first and then show them talking. In Dhoomam, I made the mistake of not revealing the uncomfortable truth in the beginning. If I had not hidden it, the viewing experience would have been different for the audience,” he reasons.
Pawan also blamed the dialogues of the original version for the film’s poor fate. “I learnt that the dialogues in Malayalam were very academic and didn’t have a soul. I don’t speak a word of Malayalam, and completely depended on the translation and direction department,” he rues.
Despite the poor result, the film has found its target audience, believes Pawan. “When we released the movie on YouTube, there was a sudden wave of audience liking the movie. I put a QR code with the ending credits. People could scan and write to me. I am glad I did that because so many people wrote to me saying they could relate to it. So, the box office result and the reception on YouTube were contrasting, leaving me a bit confused. Then I realised that there is always an audience for your works. Even if not now, years later, your film will find its audience.”
No conversation with Pawan is complete without a query about Dvitva, his ambitious project with Puneeth Rajkumar that couldn’t take off due to the untimely demise of the actor in 2021. “There are talks going on about turning into a web series. That said, I haven’t been able to decide on the lead actor,” he signs off.
The famed globe outside AVM Studios at Vadapalani in Chennai. File
| Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives
We take a deep dive into famous film shooting spots and locales across Chennai that have been etched in the memory of the masses through the celluloid world.
AVM Studios at Vadapalani has been the eternal muse of Tamil cinema. Long before CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) and green screens entered the scene, AVM Studios was the ultimate fantasy factory that has churned out vintage classics to newer, high-octane hits. In its heyday, the studio provided everything a filmmaker wanted — from bus stands, and houses to temple sets — all within its premises.
Over the decades, the Marina Beach has evolved into a canvas for reflection, happiness, love or simply a silent witness to Tamil cinema’s many moods.
The Broken Bridge overseeing the Adyar estuary has lived more in stories than in function. Its very emptiness and past familiarity turned it into a sought-after shooting spot for many filmmakers.
This package contains articles on the following seven film shooting spots located across Chennai city.
Anirudh Ravichander. File
| Photo Credit: B. Velankanni Raj
The Madras High Court on Friday (August 22, 2025) directed the organisers of film music composer Anirudh Ravichander’s Hukum World Tour concert at Seekinamkuppam near Kuvathur on East Coast Road (ECR) in Chennai on Saturday (August 23) to strictly comply with the conditions imposed by the Chengalpattu police to avoid chaos or mishaps at the event.
Justice N. Anand Venkatesh ordered that the conditions imposed by the Mamallapuram Deputy Superintendent of Police, while granting permission for the concert, must be adhered to scrupulously. The interim order was passed on a writ petition filed by Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK) MLA ‘Panaiyur’ Babu alias M. Babu, representing the Cheyyur Assembly constituency.
The judge also decided to keep the writ petition and directed the Registy to list it again on August 28 to find out whether the concert was organised in an orderly manner without giving room for a fiasco, such as the one that had occurred during A.R. Rahman’s Marakuma Nenjam concert at Panaiyur on ECR in September 2023 due to overcrowding and mismanagement.
The decision was taken after hearing the arguments advanced by the petitioner’s counsel R. Thrumoorthy, Additonal Public Prosecutor A. Damodaran, and senior counsel P.V. Balasubramanian, representing Primark Productions Private Limited and Brand Avatar, the organisers of the concert. The APP told the court that the police had imposed necessary conditions for the smooth conduct of the event.
However, filing a detailed affidavit in support of his writ petition, the MLA said he had received several representations from local residents, expressing concern over the conduct of the concert in their locality without putting in place adequate safety as well as other infrastructural requirements, especially when as many as 30,000 people were expected to participate in it.
“I inspected the venue just two days before the event and to my shock, no visible safety arrangements had been put in place. There are no temporary restrooms or sanitation facilities, and there is no sign of potable water stations or medical aid booths,” the MLA said. He clarified that his concern was not to stall the event but only to ensure that it was conducted with necessary precautions in place.
The MLA also claimed that fire safety arrangements were glaringly absent, and no evacuation plan had been formulated. “The approach road to the concert venue is a narrow 30-feet-wide rural road, which is wholly inadequate to handle the vehicular traffic. It could become a choke point,” he feared. He highlighted that the ECR stretch from Mamallapuram to Marakkanam was currently being converted from two to four lanes.
“These concerns are not merely speculative. Recent incidents have proven how dangerous an ill-planned mass event can become. In particular, I draw your attention to the A.R. Rahman’s Marakkuma Nenjam concert fiasco that occurred on ECR in September 2023. That event turned into a nightmare due to overcrowding and mismanagement,” the MLA said.
He had sought a direction to the Chengalpattu Collector to prevent the organisers from conducting Mr. Ravichander’s concert at Seekinamkuppam on Saturday, or at least postpone the event until safety arrangements were put in place.
People will find themselves in the eye of the swirling tornado that rips Dorothy’s Kansas farmhouse off its moorings and hurtles it onto Munchkinland. The film has been enhanced to fill a 160,000-square-foot wall of LED panels that spans three football fields, encircling the audience and reaching 22 stories high, as 750-horsepower fans kick up wind and debris to simulate the twister.
The $104 or more per seat spectacle is more than meets the eye. “The Wizard of Oz” marks one of the most significant partnerships between a studio and technology company to use artificial intelligence to forge a new media experience.
Reuters spoke with nine people, including principals directly involved in the project and senior entertainment industry experts, who told the story behind a project that some industry veterans see as a potential watershed moment in Hollywood’s use of AI tools.
“It definitely represents a really meaningful milestone in AI-human creative collaboration,” said Thao Nguyen, immersive arts and emerging technologies agent at CAA. “I think it will set a precedent on how we reimagine culturally significant media.”
Bringing Dorothy and the Wicked Witch to the massive Sphere, a globe-shaped entertainment venue featuring advanced technology, took two years and brought together its creative team, Warner Bros Discovery executives, Google’s DeepMind researchers, academics, visual effects artists, or more than 2,000 people, in all.
The development occurred during intense apprehension over AI’s impact on jobs in Hollywood and the desire to preserve human creativity. Some visual effects companies initially contacted to work on the project declined because they were not permitted to work with AI at the time.
Getting here took the blessing of Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav, his studio chiefs and lawyers who established guidelines for using AI. “Wizard of Oz at Sphere” drew upon archival materials from the film, including set blueprints, shot lists, publicity stills and film artifacts, as well as some 60 research papers to help deliver the movie in resolution representing a ten-fold improvement over previous work.
“We had to reimagine the cinematography, we had to reimagine the editing, and we had to do all of this without changing the experience,” said Ben Grossmann, who oversaw the project’s visual effects. “Because if you touch anything about this sacred piece of cinema, you’re toast!”
Rather than exploiting AI to cut jobs, they sought to use it to breathe fresh life into a classic story and create new experiences with existing intellectual property.
“Hollywood embraces new technology, and everyone can’t wait to be the second one to use it,” said Buzz Hays, a veteran film producer who leads Google Cloud’s entertainment industry solutions group. “What ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is doing for us is giving that first opportunity where people go, ‘Oh my god, this is not at all what I thought AI was going to be.'”
The project began in 2023 with Sphere executives discussing which project would push the technological boundaries of the venue that had already hosted U2 and Darren Aronofsky’s “Postcard from Earth.”
“The Wizard of Oz” quickly topped the list as a familiar, beloved film well-suited for the Sphere’s enormous canvas, said Carolyn Blackwood, head of Sphere Studios. It presented an opportunity to re-introduce the classic to a new generation in a way that would place them inside L. Frank Baum’s world.
Symbolically, the team chose a classic film that was a technical marvel of its time. While not the first movie to use Technicolor, “The Wizard of Oz’s” dramatic transition from sepia tones to hyper-saturated color marked a cinematic milestone.
Sphere Entertainment’s CEO James Dolan and creative collaborator Jane Rosenthal, Tribeca Film Festival co-founder and noted film producer, envisioned a more ambitious project than a mere digital remastering of a classic. Rosenthal tapped Hays to bring in Google as a technical partner.
Dolan approached Warner Bros Discovery CEO Zaslav, a friend and business partner from the early days of cable TV, to propose bringing “Oz” to the Sphere. “I had just been to the Sphere with a friend and was really blown away,” said Zaslav, adding that Dolan and Rosenthal also won over his studio chiefs, “who loved the idea It’s an example of the great IP we own at Warner Bros.”
Before turning over one of the world’s most important entertainment properties, Warner Bros set strict ground rules. Google could train its generative AI models on each major actor to reproduce their performances, but the data would remain the studio’s property. None of the “Oz” training data would be incorporated into Google’s public AI models.
“One of the things critical to getting this project started was creating a safe place for experimentation,” said Grossmann. “Warner Brothers and Google and the Sphere created an environment where they said, ‘We don’t necessarily know how it’s going to end, but we’re going to create a little quarantine zone here.'”
The visual effects team initially tried enlarging images using CGI, which would have created photorealistic animated versions of the characters. That approach was rejected because it would violate the integrity of the original performances.
“AI was effectively a last resort, because we couldn’t really do it any other way,” said Grossmann, whose Los Angeles studio, Magnopus, worked on such photo-realistic computer animated films as Disney’s “The Lion King.”
AI enhanced the resolution of tiny celluloid frames from 1939 to ultra-high-definition images. It restored details, like freckles on Dorothy’s face or burlap texture on Scarecrow’s face, obscured by Technicolor’s process. AI also helped “outpaint” on-screen images to fill gaps created by camera cuts or framing, as when it took a close-up of the Tin Man chopping a door of the Witch’s castle with an axe to free Dorothy and completed the image of the woodman.
It took months of repeated fine-tuning and Google’s DeepMind brain trust to elevate consumer-grade AI tools to deliver crisp images with the Sphere’s 16K “super” resolution.
Musicians re-recorded the entire film score on the original sound stage to take advantage of the venue’s 167,000 speakers. The vocal performances of Judy Garland and other actors remain unaltered.
Despite attention to authenticity, the project has attracted criticism from some cinephiles who object to altering the cherished film. Entertainment writer Joshua Rivera called it “an affront to art and nature.”
“None of these people criticizing this have seen the film or understand what we are doing,” said Rosenthal.
In a private midnight screening for Reuters, Grossmann offered a glimpse of what’s to come.
Some changes are subtle, as when Uncle Henry stands by the front door while neighbor Almira Gulch demands Toto. AI places the performer, who spends much of his timeout of view, back into frame, stitching together a wider view to fill the Sphere’s expansive viewing plane.
Other changes aim to realize the filmmakers’ vision in ways that weren’t technically feasible 86 years ago As Dorothy and friends the Wizard in the Emerald Throne Room, a 200-foot-high green head looms over the audience, eyes bulging and voice booming, creating amore imposing depiction than the original image of an actor in green makeup projected on smoke.
“Whenever we made a change, it was because we wanted the audience to experience what Dorothy was experiencing directly,” said Grossmann. “We completed something filmmakers were intending to do but were limited by 1939’s tools .
Coordinated physical effects add another dimension. Flying monkeys will swoop into the Sphere as 16-foot-long helium-filled simians steered by drone operators, one of many Four-D effects.
The result is an amalgam of cinema, live production and experiential VR. “I think that’s going to change the way people think about entertainment and experience,” Grossmann said.
