THE OUTSIDER ARUN KARTHICK LOOKS IN PG
Director Arun Karthick and his film Nasir are both compelling because they refuse to conform
Arun Karthick is an outsider in Tamil cinema, literally. Born, raised and settled in Thadagam, a village on the foothills of the Western Ghats and 15 km away from Coimbatore, he has, so far, avoided a move to Chennai, hub of the state’s popular cinema. “In Tamil Nadu, there has never been a tradition of parallel cinema,” he says. “That’s what I am doing.”
An engineering dropout, Karthick has neither been to film school nor has he assisted a filmmaker. His cinematic sensibilities are influenced more by the alternative cinema he saw at Film Society screenings than from commercial fare. Like the filmmakers whose works he saw as a teenager—Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Satyajit Ray— Karthick compels his audience to reflect on life. He does this particularly well in his second feature, Nasir, which won the NETPAC award for best Asian feature film at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in January. On July 1, he earned another accolade—the Grand Prix award at the 14th Andrei Tarkovsky Zerkalo International film festival in Russia held digitally in wake of the coronavirus.
In Nasir, Karthick creates a vivid portrait of a family man who works as a garment salesman. Simultaneously, he documents the bigotry he is surrounded by through provocative speeches made during Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations in Coimbatore. Karthik’s treatment is dispassionate and matter-of-fact, which only makes the quiet character study more hard-hitting. Adapted from a 1998 short story, The Clerk’s Tale by Dilip Kumar, Karthick began writing the script after a riot in Coimbatore in 2016. It’s not lost on Karthick how disconcertingly relevant his film feels. “It’s a reflection of what’s happening at large,” says the 28-year-old. “Rightwing extremism is increasing alarmingly.” To get the milieu right and to keep the narrative authentic, Karthick moved to the city’s busy market area for a year. “I believe you need to live in a space to get a sense of it,” he says. “The transition from the exterior to interior is always challenging.” Navigate it successfully and “cinema actually becomes empathy”, he adds.
In theatre director Koumarana Valavane, who runs the company Indianostrum in Puducherry, he found his Nasir. Sudha Ranganathan, a ticket checker at Coimbatore railway station, stepped in to play Nasir’s wife. “I cast based on people’s nature, the vibe they give,” says Karthick.
Nasir has made the final lists of at least 12 more festivals, including the prestigious Museum of Metropolitan Art’s New Directors/ New Films in New York, but all these have been deferred indefinitely because of Covid. Karthick, meanwhile, has been using the lockdown to finish the script for his third feature. He does not know who will produce it yet, but it will be set closer to his home in the hills.