Dr Rajkumar’s 'Uyyale' in IFFI retrospective

IFFI’s edition this year is the 50^th, and what’s golden is not just the peacock. It is also the golden jubilee, and the festival has a line-up of Indian movies that are also celebrating their golden jubilee of sorts: they are all at least 50 years old. The section has been titled The Golden Lining.

The line-up includes Hindi movies as well, notably Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Satyakam, and Shakti Samanta’s Aradhana. What’s common about the movies chosen are not so much that they were made 50 years ago, but they all seem to be family dramas and social commentaries following India’s independence. The line-up includes Varakatnam (Telugu), Stree (Oriya), Tambdi Maati (Marathi), Iru Kodugal (Tamil), Adimakal (Malayalam), Nanak Naam Jahaz Hai (Punjabi), Dr. Bezbaruah (Assamese). The one exception to the genre is Satyajit Ray’s much-celebrated fantasy comedy Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne.

Uyyale incidentally was also screened during the 1992 edition of IFFI. Labelled a “marital melodrama” on the IFFI site, Uyyale examines the story of a housewife neglected by her husband, who is a professor married to his work. As with other movies that dotted the Kannada culture landscape during that decade, Uyyale is a simple tale of marital strife with music by Vijaybhaskar and songs by PB Sreenivos and P Susheela that are hummable even today. When it released in 1969, it won a couple of awards, most notably the best story award in Kannada cinema for scriptwriter Chaduranga. It stars the hero of those times, “Annavru” Dr. Rajkumar and Kalpana, whose epithet was ‘Minugu Thaare’ (shining star).

Other similar categories at IFFI 2019 are the Oscar retrospective featuring The Sound of Music, The Godfather, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, Forrest Gump, Ben-Hur, and The Silence of the Lambs. The other retrospective is on British director, Ken Loach, who recently said that the “rise of the far-right should concern us all”.