Weeknote #12 [W25.51] - A week of watching films in Trivandrum

Watching films at IFFK 2025

I spent most of last week in Trivandrum, watching films, and having dinner with Manu afterwards. I also met my friend and ex-colleague Arjun a few times, who was attending the festival too.

I ended up watching a total of 25 films at IFFK this year — more than I’d watched in either of the last two years, and more than I’d expected to going in.

6 favourite films from IFFK 2025

A few of those 25 films stayed with me long after the screenings ended. The common thread between them was, I think, the sentiment of tenderness in how they looked at their characters.

Here’s the 6 films I liked the most:

Naseem

Saeed Akhtar Mirza (the director), who was present for the screening, introduced Naseem as an epitaph to an idea of India that ceased to exist on December 6, 1992 — the day the Babri Masjid was destroyed. Made soon after the destruction, the film itself is actually filled with immense warmth and tenderness. It is centered on the relationship between a teenage girl and her grandfather, and the stories they tell each other.

The tenderness between them, and within their stories, acts as a counterpoint to the direction the country took in the following years. And it is precisely this stark contrast that underlines the tragedy of that choice.

Young Mothers

Set in a care centre that supports young teenage mothers, the film follows four residents as they navigate life after childbirth. The difficulties they face range from absent partners to difficult family situations to substance abuse and unresolved past trauma.

The film’s strength lies in its refusal to simplify. It does not look for root causes that can be neatly diagnosed or fixed.

To be human is to accept that we all must suffer a degree of inevitable misfortune. Some of characters in the film are wonderful people trying their absolute best, while also being supported by those around them. Yet, that does not make their circumstances any easier to navigate. The film’s position is almost stoic: misfortune is inevitable, and no amount of good intention makes it disappear. What does matter is the presence of institutions — and people — that make it possible to live through hardship with dignity.

The Stranger

An adaptation of Albert Camus’s novel of the same name. I liked this far more than the book, which I had strongly disliked when I had read it around 5 years ago.

Where the novel seems to ramble on about existential detachment, the film turns that detachment outward, reframing it as a critique of bourgeois apathy toward the world around us. I love things that allow me to approach a familiar idea from a new angle, and this film does exactly that for me with Camus’s book.

Read a slightly longer review here.

Cactus Pears

A tender depiction of repressed desire and forbidden love in rural Maharashtra. What I admired most was the film’s refusal to treat attitudes toward homosexuality as uniformly hostile or tragic (which is the default approach Indian indie films tend to take, and one I’ve grown tired of).

People here are often annoying, and sometimes grossly intrusive. But that annoyance is survivable, it can be tolerated. Alongside it exist genuine pockets of care, most memorably in the form of the protagonist’s mother.

Not everything needs to be doom and gloom all the time, for that is not an accurate portrayal of reality. The film finds room for hope, without also denying the persistence of regressive attitudes toward sexuality.

Miroirs No. 3

A film about grief, told with a lot of gentleness and compassion.

It places side by side two contrasting responses to loss: one woman who cannot overcome the grief by her daughter’s death, and another woman who seems untouched by her boyfriend’s death.

Their chance encounter helps them come to terms with how to deal with loss in their own ways. As they spend time together, their feelings of guilt and grief are temporarily displaced and softened by the sharing of mundane rhythms of everyday life — cooking, cycling, washing dishes, painting fences.

Read a slightly longer review here.

The Chronology of Water

This is Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, and while it was a difficult watch, it was impressive in equal measure.

The film opens with the declaration that memories are stories, and so choose yours carefully. What follows is the protagonist’s attempt to reshape and reconstruct her own memories — many of them marked by past abuse and trauma — into something more bearable, something easier to live with.

What is both brilliant and, at times, frustrating is the film’s refusal to follow a conventional narrative structure. The unfamiliarity of the form and recognizable patterns of storytelling can be disorienting. But since the film is about memory and its reconstruction, the unconventional form is actually in service of the central of the film (it’s not breaking with convention just for the sake of it). Even if that sometimes comes at the cost of narrative cohesion, it is a bold and refreshing choice.