Avinash Prakash’s ‘Naangal’ is a deeply touching portrait of three sons who face childhood with a flawed father

This stunningly shot first feature features newcomers, and this eliminates the distance between real and make-believe. Their feelings and yearnings become our own.

Director Avinash Prakash has been my show producer ever since I “went digital”, and I have heard many of the incidents – traumatic and otherwise – narrated in this partly autobiographical story, set in Ooty. His biggest achievement in Naangal is to bring to life the word at the centre of the film’s being: “hiraeth”. It refers to a certain kind of homesickness, sometimes for a home you never knew existed. For us, most of the private lives of other people are that way. We don’t know these people existed, and yet, on a movie screen, their feelings and yearnings become ours: partly because some of human experience is shared by everyone, and partly because the part that is not shared, the part that is specific to others, comforts us that we are not alone. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote this about adults: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Naangal transposes this sentiment to a story about children.

You can read the rest of the review here:

https://www.galattaplus.com/avinash-prakashs-naangal-is-a-deeply-touching-portrait-of-three-sons-who-face-childhood-with-a-flawed-father/

You can watch the trailer / video review here:

Copyright ©2025 GALATTA.