The Image Threads

The enfant terrible of Indian cinema, Vipin Vijay, winner of a Tiger Award for Short Films in 2007 for Video Game, is now having his feature debut with a film that enchants, provokes and intrigues. This surrealist tale is a symphony of several parallel threads, a visual exploration of the virtual world evolving around an IT professor named Hari, whose philosophical contemplations are interchanged with on-line conversations with a mysterious, female-like cyber creature.
Like goddess Tara, the beautiful Ramani struggles to deny the body to get more in touch with the spiritual. The third main character is Hari’s black magician grandfather, who sporadically appears in his memories. Interweaving computer science, Indian mythology, numerology and personal symbolism, the author takes us on a contemplative journey. Exploring the virtual reality and the conscious world, the film enables us to make our own wild interpretations of signs and signals and build a personal micromemory, yet preserves a genuine Indian sensitivity. The brilliantly conceived sound design determines the rhythm and often assists in decoding the images.
This talented Malayali film maker from Kerala, still too little recognized at home, could be considered an Indian successor to Sergei Parajanov.