Kannada’s other, art-house cinema in familiar parlance, has never really scaled up to its glorious past of the 70s like Girish Kasarvalli, BV Karanth, Girish Karnad.
Of course, you had another shrewd and prolific craftsman in Puttanna Kanagal whose films found the right median between box office commerce and art-house aesthetics.
It was after nearly 45 years since you had a techie-turned-film director Raam Reddy light up the Kannada film industry skyline with his impeccable Thithi (2015).
Nearly seven years later, making similar headlines and right noises at the film festival circuits and also wooing the Karnataka public is another upstart titled Shivamma Yarehanchinala.
Having gestated the film during the year-long break in 2020 which finally found fruition in 2022, Jaishankar Aryar steadfastly strove to chisel ideating minds for creative cinema.
That his cinematic idiom and visual narrative technique have been deeply influenced by the Iranian cinema of Abbas Kiarostami and Asghar Farhadi is evident
It is, indeed, fortuitous that Shivamma Yarehanchinala was featured in the Cinema of the World Section at the 15th Edition of BIFFes, allowing local audiences to watch it.