A look at our world in crisis from a truly oblique angle: Tamil Nadu, India’s southernmost state, home to some of contemporary cinema’s most edgy work.
Films in ‘House on Fire’
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Metropolis
Lokesh Kanagaraj IFFR 2018 135′Four nameless characters drift through long Chennai nights and bleak Chennai days. They’re office workers and gangsters, lovers and passion rejects, goons out to hurt and lost souls just looking to get unharmed out of messes they didn’t make. One of last year's biggest revelations in Tamil cinema.
[EB: Ik weet niet precies wat er bedoeld wordt met 'passion rejects'.] -
Ruthless Man
Vetri Maaran IFFR 2018 150′Prabhu's already shaken but still safe-seeming middle-class existence finally falls apart when he loses his precious bike. Suddenly, he finds himself in a bleak world of betrayal and violence. A key work of modern Tamil cinema that plays like the psycho-thriller version of Vittorio de Sica's neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves (1948).
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Cold Heart
Karthik Subbaraj IFFR 2018 171′The latest generation of Tamil auteurs found its way into the film industry through short film competitions on TV. Cold Heart pays tribute to this weird world in the guise of a grimly gutsy gangster film; a dark comedy of manners whose jokes are so well-aimed they hurt. Woah!
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Wage War
Mysskin IFFR 2018 160′When boxes of chopped-off limbs appear all over the city on New Year's Eve, J.K. from CID's elite CB branch gets to work. Darkness soon takes his hand. A police procedural turns social expose turns meditation on the metaphysics of truth, by way of a homage to Kurosawa and Kitano.