MAMI 2023: Avinash Prakash’s ‘Naangal’ is a deeply felt portrait of an unhappy family that’s not without its bouts of happiness

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

There is a scene in where two young boys have rolled up pieces of paper for a “message in a bottle” scenario. The setting is an estate in Ooty. Their father is at a distance, walking with their older brother, and seeing him, these two kids drop to their knees to hide from his line of sight. But he finds them eventually, and they all start talking, and the evening light turns to twilight, and the scene becomes a living-breathing photograph. The film – set largely in the 1990s – is almost entirely like that. It is a memory piece. It is like finding a family album in someone’s home, flipping through the pages, and extrapolating each photograph into a place and time and mood and feeling. I have seen different cuts of over the past few months, but this four-hour-eighteen-minute version playing at the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, 2023, is the most affecting. At parts, I felt childhood come alive, dysfunction and all.

You can read the rest of the review here:

https://www.galatta.com/tamil/movie/review/naangal/

And you can watch the trailer / video review here:

Copyright ©2023 GALATTA.