Revisiting Childhood in Frames

Anoop Lokkur’s Don’t Tell Mother, which premiered at the Busan International Film Festival, is an intimate tale of a child navigating violence

- By DEEPA NATARAJAN LOBO

The flash of a camera. The hum of a VCR. The gentle murmur of bedtime stories. For Melbourne-based filmmaker Anoop Lokkur, whose Kannada feature film Don’t Tell Mother premiered at the 30th edition of the Busan International Film Festival, these weren’t the mere sights and sounds of a 90s childhood in the then-sleepy city of Bengaluru— they were the seeds of a lifelong affair with filmmaking. “One of my earliest memories of cinema is watching classics like ET Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Mary Poppins on the VCR,” he recalls.

The only Kannada film to be selected at the festival this year, Don’t Tell Mother is a coming-of-age drama that follows Aakash, a nine-year-old boy navigating childhood. In school, he endures the anger of a frustrated teacher, keeping it hidden from his mother. Meanwhile, his mother wrestles with the suffocating demands of patriarchy that leaves little space for her own identity.