Naangal

It's the 1990s, in a sleepy hillside town in Southern India there is a cavernous mansion surrounded by plantations, inside three preadolescent brothers live with their German shepherd. They buy the groceries, lug water up the slopes in plastic cans, get each other ready for school and lend a hand to workers on the estate. The boys may practically run the house, but the lord of this forsaken domain is their father, a ruthless martinet whose mere sight frightens them to the core.

An uncompromising memoir of remarkable integrity, Avinash Prakash’s debut feature Naangal is a domestic epic that immerses the audience in the shared universe of its child protagonists, making us intimate with their collective joys and crippling fears. Their tyrannical father cuts a near-mythical figure, but through sheer accumulation of character detail, we see a man behind the mask, a failure whose authority stems from a desperate attempt to hold his life together.

Naangal is a work true to a place and a time, but above all, to itself: a film that stares unflinchingly at a primal wound, a tragedy in the making, with an honest, critical eye that is as rare as it is moving.

– Srikanth Srinivasan