National Awards to ‘The Kerala Story’: Are the Awards worth fighting for — or fighting over — anymore?
In every film award, there are certain categories that are manufactured entirely to appease egos and placate prevailing political sentiments. But with each passing year, as more and more films of little merit and dangerous ideas are heaped with awards, the dangers of propaganda becomes apparent
The Kerala Story has all but guaranteed that its relevance won’t outlast this particular political — and cultural — moment. The kindest thing that one can say about The Kerala Story (2023) is that it is no Triumph of the Will (1935). Unlike the latter, produced and directed by Leni Riefenstahl, a close collaborator of Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, Sudipto Sen’s film at least packages its indefensible message in something like a plot — a poison pill coated in sugar. Like the truth, lies too are easier to swallow that way. Triumph of the Will was, as evident from the name, a “triumphal” declaration of a great untruth, that a work built on the dehumanisation and debasement of any section of people could make for transcendental art. A two-hour-long film cut from over 61 hours of footage shot at the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, Riefenstahl’s film was propaganda in its baldest, take-it-or-leave-it form. It attempted not to persuade, but bludgeon in its view of Germany as a great power led by a great man.
Yet, one of the unkindest things that can be said about The Kerala Story is also that it is no Triumph of the Will. The latter was technically brilliant, the terrible beauty of its images — those roaring crowds, those marching boots, a wildly gesticulating Fuhrer — ensuring that it lives on in cultural memory as a prime example of how art, too, can be used to serve humanity’s basest instincts. The Kerala Story, on the other hand, has all but guaranteed that its relevance won’t outlast this particular political — and cultural — moment. One is hard put to find anything about its technical and artistic aspects, whether it’s the overwrought direction and acting or the pedestrian cinematography and editing, that ensures its place in cinema history.
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