Thangalaan [Director’s Cut]

A colonial prospector in Southern India hunts for gold with a group of villagers, fighting sorcerers, wild beasts and their own frail psyches. Powered by throbbing action sequences, Thangalaan forges an epic period adventure about humans torn apart by ambition, greed, madness and desperation.

Having lost his land to a scheming dominant-caste landlord, proud family man Thangalaan is compelled to join British officer Clement on his hunt for gold, with the vague promise of both remuneration and escape from the feudal order of his village. But as Clement and his crew reach their destination, the mighty guardian sorceress Arathi stands between them and their fortune, determined to confront Thangalaan with the truth about himself and his destiny.

Where Vagabond (IFFR 2018) recast indentured migration in British India into a metaphysical picture of human suffering, Thangalaan looks at this colonial phenomenon through an exhilarating marriage of fantasy and hard fact. Trailblazing Tamil filmmaker Pa. Ranjith’s seventh feature attempts to construct nothing less than an alternative founding myth of the Indian subcontinent.

With a sweeping vision that spans millennia and lifetimes, Ranjith’s novelistic film charts the evolution of the relationship between land, people and power across socio-economic history, subverting traditional accounts of victors and victims, liberators and exploiters. The result is a tremendously layered political work that sacrifices none of its affective power. Ranjith’s trenchant, richly imaginative adventure epic will world premiere at IFFR in an expansive, visceral director’s cut.

– Srikanth Srinivasan

Trailer

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