Unique Malayalam film prevailed over the Censor Board.
By Unnikrishanan Nair
NEW YORK: Papilio Buddha, a film written and directed by the New York-based Jayan K. Cherian, has been officially selected for the 37th Montreal World Film Festival.
The festival, which runs from August 22 to September 2, has a total selection of 432 films from around 80 countries.
Papilio Buddha will be screened in the ‘Focus on World Cinema,’ a section which showcases more than 200 films. It’s one of the four feature films and two shorts from India to have been selected for the festival.
In addition to the Montreal World Film Festival, Papilio Buddha has been an official selection at a few other acclaimed international film festivals, which include the British Film Institute (BFI) LGFF, the Athens International Film Video Festival, Oaxaca Film Fest, and the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival.
Shot in Malayalam and dubbed in various regional Indian languages, Papilio Buddha is perhaps the most significant selection of this year’s Montreal World Film Festival from India. In addition to the film’s critical acclaim and box office success, it has survived a notorious legal battle with India’s censor board after it was initially banned.
This possibly makes Papilio Buddha the first Indian movie to have had a complete ban entirely reversed. After the first judicial appeal process, the filmmakers refused to concede to any of the subsequent cuts that were demanded by India’s censor board. The Board finally relented and gave a full certificate of approval without any cuts to the original film.
Papilio Buddha narrates the story of a group of displaced Dalits in the Western Ghats of India. Ostracized and oppressed for centuries by India’s upper caste elite, they struggle to preserve their ancestral lands and way of life. They are labeled ‘terrorists,’ by a media controlled by corporate interests, whose money and influence extends to all political parties, irrespective of ideology.
Until they give up their lands that have sustained them, these Dalits are prone to imprisonment and torture by police and paramilitary forces, who often function as nothing more than muscle for hire. The film offers a glimpse into the only hope of emancipation for these Dalits, which lies with eschewing the politics of religion and caste, embodied and disguised by Gandhism. (Global India Newswire)