A film about darkness, lit up just right
in their daily at-home life. I photographed my backyard on a quasirainy day,” she says. “And there was rain, and there was sunlight. There were feelings of sorrow, but there was also hope.”
“Stuck at home in the first lockdown, I felt depressed. This image is a representation of poor mental health and a desperate plea for the end of the pandemic,” Ranita Roy (@ranita3roy), 27, from Kolkata.
Analia Cid (@analia.cid), 31, from Argentina, submitted a photograph of her partner Agustín, their cat and his newborn nephew and godson Milo. Agustín has a heart condition that puts him at higher risk for Covid-19, so the couple isolated extra-carefully in the lockdown. But on his birthday, in October, his sister and Milo visited. “I wanted to express the tenderness and vulnerability of this moment,” Cid says. “Our societies tend to erase ways of living healthier masculinities from the public view and I think that as photographers, it is our job to show that this is possible.”
If there’s one thing that gleams about the Malayalam film Irul, it’s the cinematography. Curtains are backlit as if by moonlight, candles are used to great effect in a grand old house as the power blinks on and off in a storm.
Released on Netflix, Irul (which means Darkness) has an interesting premise, though the plot falls away in the second half. A novelist named Alex (Soubin Shahir) and a lawyer named Archana (Darshana Rajendran) decide to get away for the weekend, leaving their cellphones behind. When their car stalls amid the Ghats, they make their way to a bungalow atop a hill. A rather odd man (Fahadh Faasil) lets them in, but there’s a body in the basement, the house has a strange connection to Alex, and it is clear that one of the men is a killer. Archana just can’t tell which one.
Jomon T John, cinematographer and co-producer of Irul, says the film was a break from the blockbusters that take up most of his time. John has shot numerous Malayalam, Tamil and Hindi hits, including Golmaal Again (2017), Simmba (2018) and the upcoming Sooryavanshi, starring Akshay Kumar. With smaller films, he says, “you get to do a lot more with little”. Excerpts from an interview:
We wanted to shoot in an eerie old bungalow that had a large living room. The surroundings of the house had to be uninhabited, so that even though very little of the film is shot from the outside, it still lent that feeling of mysteriousness. We found this bungalow on a hill in Idukki. It was the first of the few that we checked out, and the one we finally chose.
I don’t get very technical with my shoots. I follow the soul and emotion of the script. Except for the few outdoor night scenes in the beginning, the entire film was shot in the daytime, though the story plays out at night. We were able to achieve that nighttime gloom and mystery using candles, and you don’t see this in the film but we used a lot of Chinese lanterns, which brought that hazy texture to the film.
Irul was shot in a month. How different is that from the big-budget films that you also do?
The difference is in the industries. They are at two extreme ends and I really enjoy the contrasts. For a big film, we’re usually shooting for 100 days with a huge crew. It’s like working at a multinational corporation. Everything has protocol and schedules.
When I get the time, I like to come to Kerala and shoot smaller films, with a smaller crew. I think small films do more magic, where you can do a lot more with little.