Amma Ariyan

In John Abraham’s AMMA ARIYAN, the journey planned is not the journey taken, and a duty to the dead is also a duty to the living. Purushan (Joy Mathew) leaves home in Kerala for Delhi, only to find his cross-country trip interrupted when the jeep carrying him is requisitioned by police officers to transport a corpse lying by the roadside. Suddenly, the scholarship that had awaited the young intellectual in the capital no longer seems important; believing he recognises the man who hanged himself but unable to place him, Purushan seeks first to establish the identity of the deceased and then to deliver the news of his death to the man’s mother. This leads Purushan and an ever-growing group of comrades through a region in the midst of a revolt against injustice, the suicide of a single person becoming a prism through which Abraham depicts a popular demand for change. AMMA ARIYAN marries disjunctive montage with a documentary sensitivity to place, crafting a moving film in which the intimate and the collective, as well as the poetic and the political, are inextricably intertwined. Appearing in a new restoration, this masterwork of Parallel Cinema was the fourth and final feature Abraham completed before his death in 1987 at age 49. (Erika Balsom)

John Abraham: KOYNA NAGAR (1967, K), PRIYA (1969, K), HIDES AND STRINGS (1969, K), THIS WAY, STUDENTS (1971), DONKEY IN A BRAHMIN VILLAGE (1977), CRUELTIES OF CHERIYACHAN (1979)