Saudi's Red Sea Film Festival to Feature Malayalam Work Paka as Part of Competition

The inaugural edition of the Red Sea International Film Festival (December 6-15) at Jeddah in Saudi Arabia will feature the Malayalam work, Paka (River of Blood). Helmed by the debutant director Nithin Lukose, it is about two families in the Malabar region of Kerala that have been locked in a blood feud. They are separated by a river – which has turned into a graveyard for the clans’ casualties. But in a true Romeo and Juliet style, this drama focuses on Anna and Johnny – on either side of the divide – falling in love. Will this signal the end of the bloody rivalry?

Paka will be among the 16 titles competing for the Golden Yusr Award.

The 10-day Festival in the historic city on the Red Sea (from which the event takes its name) will open with Cyrano, helmed by the British director, Joe Wright (well know for Atonement). It has been scripted by Erica Schmidt and is a take-off from her 2018 stage production, which again was a reimagining of the French play (considered a classic) of 1897, Cyrano de Bergerac, written by Edmund Rostand.

Famous French actor Gerard Depardieu played the titular character in a 1990 French comedy-drama, Cyrano de Bergerac, helmed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau that was based on Rostand’s work. The French film was the first screen version in colour of Rostand’s creation. The movie garnered 4,732, 136 footfalls in France. Earlier, there was another edition in black and white, but Rappeneau’s is considered more faithful to the original play and more lavish.

The Festival will close on December 15 with the world premiere of Bara El Manhag by the Egyptian director, Amr Salama. This is some sort of horror fantasy about an orphan child who walks into a haunted house and becomes friends with the ghost which resides there. These days, cinema and television series in India and elsewhere seem obsessed with the supernatural.

The Festival was to have had its first edition in March 2020, but was cancelled at the eleventh hour because of the Coronavirus Pandemic.

(Gautaman Bhaskaran is an author, commentator and movie critic)

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