RAAM REDDY THE TALE OF A FABULOUS FABULIST

A decade after his National Award-winning debut, the filmmaker has come up with his sophomore movie. Blending myth, magic, and the mundane, the hauntingly beautiful movie, titled Jugnuma: The Fable, is his flight of fantasy-albeit on man-made wings

- By Ananya Ghosh

Raam Reddy, who had made his directorial debut with the Kannada drama Thithi in 2015—the movie that premiered at the 68th Locarno International Film Festival picking up the Golden Leopard in the Filmmakers of the Present category, and went on to win the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Kannada—has just dropped his sophomore film after a decade.

And this time he is experimenting with magic realism—Jugnuma: The Fable unfolds like a bedtime story told by an old grandma mixing half-forgotten folktales and myths with contemporary occurrences.

The year is 1989. Dev (Manoj Bajpayee) lives with his wife and two kids in a colonial-era bungalow located inside a sprawling Himalayan orchard that he has inherited from his ancestors who served the British. The orchard provides employment to the locals and their relationship with Dev and his family remain that of landlord and tenant. Even though there is discontent among the locals over Dev's introduction of chemical pesticides in the area to extract high yields, which will have long-term negative consequences on the ecology of the area, they are fiercely loyal to Dev and even when later in the story he kicks them out of their jobs and withholds their salaries for no fault of their, they don’t protest. But then, not everyone is willing to be subservient to this erstwhile zamindar—simmering dissent ignite sporadic flickers of rebellion which soon start spreading like forest fires, literally. As a mystified Dev vehemently tries to make sense of the goings on, a thick fog of suspicion and mistrust settles over the valley. It is then the whodunit shifts gear snapping its ties with the real and spreads its mechanical wings towards the magical.