Day: October 20, 2015

Kothanodi (The River of Fables) at London film Festival

kothanodi-04

Kothanodi (The River of Fables) was dark, twisted, disturbing and a brilliant attempt by 1st time director Bhaskar Hazarika to bring 4 Assamese folklore to visual medium.
The film has dark undercurrents of traditional folktales, that keeps you on the edge and it has a brilliant blend of reality and magic realism.
The movie was screened at ICA as a part of 2015 London Film festival.
I was really impressed with the film and would like to congratulate the whole team who worked on it for attempting something different and delivering it.
Synopsis by Cary Rajinder Sawhney

The darkest fairytales are often the most compelling, unsettling us by touching on universal fears and desires. It is a feeling that Bhaskar Hazarika mines with the grotesque magical realism of his debut feature. Four traditional folk fables present disturbing, multi-layered tales of the travails of their female protagonists, revealing the underlying patriarchy that drives the woman to the edge of sanity. Senehi is a village wife who plots her stepdaughter’s murder when her husband leaves for work. Her husband Devinath (Adil Hussain) meets a woman who has given birth to a strange vegetable and resolves to help her unearth the mystery. Meanwhile, in another village a rich woman (Seema Biswas) prepares her daughter for marriage to a python, hoping that untold riches will spring from the union. And a mother resolves to save her newborn child from the husband who buried her previous three babies alive somewhere in the jungle.

It’s a bad trailer and doesn’t do the justice to the film, but it gives a taste of the film without ruining the plot.

Director Bhaskar Hazarika
Producers Anurupa Hazarika, Utpala Mukherjee
Screenwriters Bhaskar Hazarika, Arupa Patangia-Kalita
India 2015
115 mins
Production company Metanormal Motion Pictures

Cast
Seema Biswas as Dhoneshwari
Adil Hussain as Devinath
Zerifa Wahid as Senehi
Urmila Mahanta as Keteki
Kopil Bora as Poonai
Asha Bordoloi as Malati
Kasvi Sharma
Monisha Bhuyan
Dr Jayanta Das
Pradhan Deori

 

A photo posted by Parag Sankhe (@paragsankhe) on

Parag Sankhe Website