Mushrooms Aka Chatrak
Directors fortnight- Cannes Film Festival 2011
Jayasundara's 3rd feature Chatrack continue to explore South Asian psyches contorted by massive social forces, but this time he makes a significant leap north. This is his first film set in India. Rahul (Sudip Mukherjee) is a Bengali architect returning to Kolkata after years of work in Dubai, where he managed a huge construction site. Awaiting him is his beautiful girlfriend Paoli (Paoli Dam), who lives alone and far from her family. But Rahul’s seemingly successful life is overshadowed by the search for his brother (Sumeet Thakur), said to now be mad and living in the forest, where he sleeps in the trees. Despite appearances, the two brothers may have much in common. Part surreal song of nature, part muffled cry of urban despair, Mushrooms hovers like a dream. Jayasundara blends minimalist aesthetics with a thoughtful, melancholy tone to evoke his characters’ alienation from their surroundings. In the city, constant construction reflects the social convulsions taking place. In the woods, the arrival of a European soldier manifests the feeling of a natural environment unsettled and compromised by violent order. Jayasundara’s films can never be entirely defined by their plots. Encouraging each viewer to meet him partway, he crafts his narratives as a series of questions and his characters as open forms. Working outside his home country for the first time, and aided by the capable Sri Lankan cinematographer Channa Deshapriya, this unique filmmaker has brought a fascinating visitor’s eye to contemporary West Bengal. (Cameron Bailey, Co-Director, Toronto International film Festival)
His work speaks from the borders: those that separate a country from another, modern cities from ancestral land, and the threshold between the living and the dead. And from there, it erases the borders between fiction and documentary, between cinema and visual arts, expanding the very limits of filmmaking, generating hypnotic visions, pictures of great plastic beauty, and situations that go from the surreal to the humoristic.
the most important film event in Chile, Valdivia International Film Festival is the first film festival to program A retrospective of films by Vimukthi Jayasundara.
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