A Kerala Studies Blog
How is the Mappila ‘qualified’ in Malayalam Cinema? Ahnas Muhammed dives deep into the popular cinematic representations of the Malabar Muslim identities and explores how the changing representations have reshaped societal perceptions and cultural values.
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How and where do we situate the “archival” when it comes to film historiography? In this article, Mydhily takes us[…]
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മലയാള സിനിമ OTT വഴി ഇന്ത്യയിലുടനീളമുള്ള നഗരങ്ങളിലെ ഉന്നതർക്ക് എത്തുന്ന ഈ കാലത്ത്, മലയാള സിനിമകളെ വളരെക്കാലമായി ആസ്വദിച്ചിട്ടുള്ള ഗൾഫ് കുടിയേറ്റക്കാർക്കിടയിലെ പ്രദേശാന്തര കാഴ്ച്ചക്കാരെ നാം മറക്കുന്നു.[…]
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Even as OTT brings Malayalam cinema to urban elites across India, we forget the transregional viewership that Malayalam cinema has long enjoyed among Gulf migrants. Drawing from his own life, Nehal reflects on how Malayalam cinema speaks to the Bihari Gulf migrant experience.
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The recently released film, Kaathal, has ignited public discussions of gender and sexuality in Kerala. But to what extent does it subvert Kerala’s norms around family, caste, and class? Sandra Elizabeth Joseph reflects.
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The ways in which we have come to negotiate with the presence of technology in our lives are multiple and varied. Himaganga revisits the 2021 Malayalam film Chathurmukham to see how the techno-horror genre represents some of the anxieties that surround the pervasiveness of media devices in our everyday lives.
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Pulp fiction in Kerala remains a genre that does not receive much attention, despite the significant role it has played in cultivating a reading culture in Kerala. Serialised novels in Malayalam weeklies had readers hooked for decades. Shibu B S delves into the rich world of painkili (‘songbird’) novels in Kerala.
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With streaming services bringing transnational attention to Malayalam cinema, it becomes important to examine the nature of Kerala’s “new gen” cinema and to locate it in a longer history. C S Venkiteswaran, film critic, Don Palathara, film director, and Jolly Chirayath, actor, feature in Ala’s first audio essay on cinema in Kerala.
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Purushapretham has been among this year’s most intriguing releases so far, seeming like a police procedural at the outset but revealing hidden depths. Deepti delves into how the director draws viewers into a complex ecology of human and nonhuman actors, marking an exciting addition to the emergent ‘cli-fi’ genre in Malayalam cinema.
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How does Mammootty’s linguistic prowess enable him to move from being the Muslim “other” to an embodiment of the “standard” Malayalee man? Afeef Ahmed analyses the multiple ways by which Mammootty, both as an actor and an individual, negotiates his identity and selfhood through language.
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