The Malayalam Parallel Cinema

01Adoor Gopalakrishnan and the founding decade

Adoor Gopalakrishnan, trained at the Film and Television Institute of India in the late 1960s and a co-founder of the Chitralekha Film Cooperative in Kerala, made Swayamvaram (1972) as a debut feature funded by the Film Finance Corporation. The film, about a young couple — Sharada and Madhu — who run away from home to live in the city and are slowly worn down by economic precarity, won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film and is generally identified as the starting point of Malayalam parallel cinema. Adoor's subsequent films — Kodiyettam (1977), Elippathayam (1981), Mukhamukham (1984), Anantaram (1987) and Mathilukal (1990) — established the rigorous, near-Bressonian register that critics like Madhu Eravankara have for fifty years used as the standard against which the Indian art film is measured.

Elippathayam, in particular, became the international flagship of the movement: it won the Sutherland Trophy at the BFI London Film Festival in 1982 for the most original and imaginative film, was shown in Cannes Un Certain Regard, and has remained on retrospective programmes worldwide for over forty years. Karamana Janardanan Nair's Unni — the film's central figure, a Nair feudal landlord whose social class is collapsing and who literalises his own paralysis through an obsession with the rats in his ancestral home — is one of the great single-actor performances of Indian cinema. Mathilukal (1990), based on Vaikom Muhammad Basheer's autobiographical novel about his time as a political prisoner under colonial rule, won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1990 Venice Film Festival and built its central love story entirely through a romance carried over a prison wall, the woman never seen, only heard. Adoor's importance is not just his own filmography but the model his existence provided to younger directors — that an authored, serious cinema could be made in Kerala without leaving Kerala.

02G. Aravindan, K.G. George and John Abraham

G. Aravindan, who had begun as a cartoonist at the magazine Mathrubhumi where his long-running series Cheriya Manushyarum Valiya Lokavum became a cultural object in itself, made Uttarayanam (1974) as his debut and then Kanchana Sita (1977), Thampu (1978) — about a circus that arrives in a Kerala village and the slow accumulation of small encounters across the days it stays — Esthappan (1980), Pokkuveyil (1982), Chidambaram (1985, which won the National Award for Best Film) and Vasthuhara (1991). His register, quieter and more lyrical than Adoor's, has been read by critics like CS Venkiteswaran against a Tarkovsky-Bergman lineage with overlays of the Kerala folk-tale tradition; the village-as-stage compositions in Thampu and the long contemplative landscapes of Esthappan are the direct ancestors of Lijo Jose Pellissery's Ee.Ma.Yau and Jallikattu. Aravindan's death from a brain haemorrhage on 15 March 1991 in Thiruvananthapuram, in his early fifties, cut short what was widely regarded as the most distinctive directorial voice of his generation.

K.G. George worked partly inside the parallel canon and partly inside the Malayalam mainstream — his career is the clearest demonstration of how thin the wall between the two actually was in the period. Yavanika (1982), structured as a missing-person mystery inside a touring drama troupe, with Bharath Gopi as the percussionist Ayyappan whose disappearance the film returns to obsessively from multiple character vantages, and Lekhayude Maranam Oru Flashback (1983), the suicide of a young actress reconstructed from the testimonies of the men around her, are widely cited masterpieces. Adaminte Variyellu (1984), structured around three women whose lives intersect across class lines, is one of the most unsentimental feminist films Indian cinema has produced. Irakal (1985) extended his work into harder social terrain. John Abraham, the most uncompromising figure of the movement, founded the Odessa Collective to fund and exhibit films outside the conventional distribution chain; Amma Ariyan (1986), funded entirely through small public subscriptions raised across Kerala via the Odessa group, remains the movement's most political and most singular work. He died on 31 May 1987 after falling from a rooftop in Kozhikode, having drunk through the previous evening; he was forty-nine.

03Shaji N. Karun, MT Vasudevan Nair and the wider field

Shaji N. Karun trained as a cinematographer at the FTII and built his early career shooting for G. Aravindan on Thampu, Esthappan and Chidambaram, and for K.G. George — a body of cinematographic work that, read on its own, is one of the foundational records of Indian art-film camera practice in the period. His own debut feature, Piravi (1989), about an old man Raghava Chakyar (Premji) who waits at a riverbank for a son disappeared during the National Emergency in police custody, won the Caméra d'Or special mention at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival and the National Film Award for Best Feature Film. Swaham (1994) competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1994; Vanaprastham (1999), an India-France co-production starring Mohanlal as the kathakali artist Kunjikuttan, played in Un Certain Regard at Cannes 1999. Shaji N. Karun died in April 2025 in Thiruvananthapuram.

M.T. Vasudevan Nair, the Jnanpith-winning Malayalam novelist, was the literary spine of the period's middle and parallel cinema. His screenplays for Hariharan's Nirmalyam (1973, which he also directed himself, winning the National Award for Best Feature Film), Vellam (1985) and Oru Vadakkan Veeragatha (1989), and his work on Bharathan's Thakara (1979) and Sibi Malayil's Sadayam (1992), gave the era its strongest writing tradition; M.T. as critic-screenwriter belongs to a small Indian sub-tradition that includes Satyajit Ray and Girish Karnad, in which the working novelist is also the working screenwriter. Around this central group sat directors like P.A. Backer (Kabani Nadi Chuvannappol, 1975), the late Pavithran (Uppu, 1986), and the slightly younger Lenin Rajendran (Meenamasathile Sooryan, 1985; Swathi Thirunal, 1987), whose Marxist-historical features extended the parallel-cinema project through the late 1980s. T.V. Chandran, with Alicinte Anweshanam (1989) and Pondichery (1992), worked at the boundary between the parallel and the middle film and is one of the figures the canon has periodically failed to keep in view.

Vasudevan Nair, the Jnanpith-winning Malayalam novelist, was the literary spine of the period's middle and parallel cinema.

04Why Kerala's parallel cinema kept its audience

The Malayalam parallel cinema is unusual in Indian film history because it kept a popular audience. The reasons are structural and have been documented in detail by critics like CS Venkiteswaran, GP Ramachandran and the older generation of Madhu Eravankara essays. Kerala had — and still has — the highest literacy rate in India, a long tradition of left-led cultural politics that valued serious cinema as part of public life, and a film society network anchored in the Federation of Film Societies of India (FFSI) chapters that ran continuous education and exhibition programmes from the late 1960s onward. The Kerala State Chalachitra Academy, founded formally in 1998, was built on much older institutional foundations, including the Kerala State Film Awards instituted in 1969 — the first state film award scheme in India to consistently treat the auteur film and the mainstream film as comparable objects of attention. The IFFK, which began in Thiruvananthapuram in 1996 and has run uninterrupted since (with the brief 2020 pandemic adjustment), is the institution that has done more than any other to sustain a broad Kerala viewership for serious world cinema.

The result was that an Adoor or Aravindan film was something a Kerala middle-class family went to see, not just something written about in specialist journals. The 1970s and 1980s campus screenings, the FFSI weekend programmes, the Mathrubhumi and Kalakaumudi review columns, and the active discussion culture of the Kerala literary magazines turned cinema into part of the same public reading life that included the novel and the political weekly. CS Venkiteswaran has argued that this is best understood as a single cultural infrastructure — sustained substantially under successive Communist-led state governments — that treated film, literature and theatre as continuous fields. That overlap is what makes the Malayalam parallel cinema a movement and not just a cluster of individual filmographies, and it is the key fact that distinguishes the Kerala model from every other Indian state's parallel-cinema history.

05Critical reception and reassessment

The contemporary critical reception of the Malayalam parallel cinema was unusually serious — and unusually argumentative — in its own time. The Kerala film-society network, the Mathrubhumi and Kalakaumudi columns, and the writings of Madhu Eravankara, Vijayakrishnan, GP Ramachandran and the younger CS Venkiteswaran tracked the films in real time with a technical seriousness the parallel-cinema movements in Bengal and Hindi enjoyed only in retrospect. The early Adoor films were debated against Bresson and Antonioni almost from the moment of their release. Aravindan's Esthappan was received with some bewilderment and only slowly accepted into the canon. K.G. George's Adaminte Variyellu, in particular, has had its critical reputation revised upward repeatedly since the early 2000s as the film's structural feminism — the way the three women's narratives refuse to be subsumed into a unifying authorial voice — has come into clearer focus.

The later reassessment has been less kind to certain figures. The contested terrain around John Abraham's personal life, particularly his alcoholism and the conditions of his death, has produced a complicated canonical conversation that the Madhyamam Aazhchapathippu generation has been unwilling to leave to hagiography. The retrospective treatment of the period's gender dynamics — the small number of women working as directors, the absence of a P.K. Rosy figure being seriously discussed until the 2010s, the uneven treatment of women's narratives even in a film as deliberate as Adaminte Variyellu — has also become part of how the period is taught now. Madhu Eravankara's later writings, GP Ramachandran's collected criticism and CS Venkiteswaran's essays for The Hindu and Outlook have done much of the work of holding the period's actual achievements in view while refusing to treat it as a closed and finished canon.

06The legacy: the New Generation reabsorption

The post-2010 New Generation movement in Malayalam cinema is, in one important sense, the reabsorption of the parallel-cinema sensibility into the commercial mainstream. The directors are explicit about it. Lijo Jose Pellissery has cited Aravindan and Adoor in interviews on Film Companion South and in his Cannes-circuit press; his Ee.Ma.Yau (2018) sits on a direct continuum with Aravindan's village-as-stage compositions, and the Jallikattu (2019) hunt sequence is unimaginable without the Aravindan-Shaji N. Karun cinematographic tradition that preceded it. Dileesh Pothan's Maheshinte Prathikaaram (2016) and Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum (2017) carry forward the K.G. George interest in small-community moral tension and the Yavanika-style structural patience with the missing object as plot engine. Geethu Mohandas's Liar's Dice (2013) and Moothon (2019) extend the spare, elliptical mode that Adoor had refined. Aashiq Abu's Virus (2019) borrows the ensemble-political register of the wider movement. Rajeev Ravi's Kammatipaadam (2016) and Annayum Rasoolum (2013), made by a director who had also worked extensively as cinematographer for Anurag Kashyap, draw directly on the cinematographic tradition that Shaji N. Karun had built for G. Aravindan. Mahesh Narayanan's Take Off (2017) and Malik (2021) carry the parallel-cinema procedural seriousness into the mid-budget thriller register.

The reabsorption was made possible by the unique Kerala fact described above: because the parallel-cinema audience had never fully separated from the mainstream audience, the New Generation directors did not have to invent a new viewer for their work. They could work in the auteur register and still expect a popular release. That continuity from Swayamvaram (1972) to Manjummel Boys (2024) — fifty-two years of an industry in which the most ambitious art and the most popular entertainment have shared a single audience — is, more than any single film or director, the most important fact about Malayalam cinema as a whole. The parallel-cinema movement did not survive as a separate stream into the present. It survived by dissolving into everything that came after it.

The parallel-cinema movement did not survive as a separate stream into the present.