WHAT'S SOUTH CINEMA DOING RIGHT

JAI Shankar Aryar's Kannada language debut Shivamma is a small, unassuming film-about a poor, illiterate woman's indomitable entrepreneurial spirit that won the New Currents Award at the 27th edition of the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea.

- NAMRATA JOSHI

A notable aspect about the quiet film is that it is backed by Rishab Shetty, the writer-director-actor of Kantara, a film that has shattered box office records, not just in Karnataka but across India, with its mix of folklore and mythology, while also dwelling on contemporary issues like land rights and forest preservation. Last year too, Rishab had struck a fine balance by backing Raj B. Shetty's gripping Garuda Gamana Vrishabha Vahana aka GGVV, a gangster saga with underpinnings of homoeroticism and Natesh Hegde's Pedro, a slice of village life and its entrenched feudalism and fanaticism that bring out the latent beast in humans.

The runaway success of a Kannada filmmaker like Rishab in both the mainstream and arthouse space is in stark contrast to the quagmire that filmmakers in the North have been stuck in. The pandemic has left Hindi cinema in a debilitating impasse both creative and commercial. On the other hand, the South film industries-Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam-are attracting the masses as well as the cinephiles into their folds, and not just in their respective home turfs. SS Rajamouli, who has captured the imagination of Hollywood, has found his newest admirer in the hard-asnails Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw who posted a selfie on Instagram with the director of "the head-bangingly fabulous RRR".