Viewed at the 14th Golden Apricot Film Festival in Yerevan. The Awards accorded by the International jury at Yerevan 2017 proved once again that festival prizes like Hollywood Oscars are next to meaningless. A Gold plated jury consisting of eminent filmmakers such as Hugh Hudson of England, Ildiko Enyedi of Hungary, and Ciro Guerra of Columbia, named a piece of cinematic trash, the Indian film "Sexy Durga" as Best Film while another Study in Boredom, "A Man of Integrity", from Iran, was awarded a Silver Apricot by the Fipresci Jury of fussy international film critics. The audience voted with their feet. What the most unsexy and extremely dreary Malayalam language film "Sexy Durga" did receive from the savvy Yerevan film audience was the largest number of walkouts of the week. After a very badly filmed overly long opening sequence of the colorful masochistic Durga festival in Kerala the movie settles into an endlessly dim all night road movie with a young couple of northerners trying to hitchhike to the train station to get back home while constantly being threatened and terrorized by the local scum who pick them up and by other scum they encounter along the way. All this filmed in semi or total darkness with a level of adeptness and treatment of material far below that of UCLA or USC student films.
Realizing that this attempt at bludgeoning an audience into awareness of a major Indian social problem, public unpunished rape, was basically going nowhere and was extremely unpleasant to watch, I joined the steady stream of walkouts after some forty fidgety minutes. I suspect that the only people left in the theater at the bitter end were a dutiful band of jury assessors.
Jurist Ciro Guerra (last years Golden Apricot winner for "Embrace of the Serpent") stated that the justification for the award was that this film courageously draws attention to a major social problem, the public abuse and rape of woman which is rampant and more or less taken for granted in India today. Definitely a national disgrace that needs to be addressed, but not by a film that is so badly made it drives people out of the theater in droves long before it's over.
Malayalam director Sanal Kumar Sasidharan taking the stage to express his thanks and to receive his traditional basket of apricots seemed to be as surprised as the closing ceremony audience that his dull unpleasant film had been named as Golden Apricot Best Film. It was obviously programmed because it had received a similar award at Rotterdam in January by a similarly dazed jury. The award here in Yerevan was clearly for the good human rights Intentions of the director rather than for his filmmaking expertise which was painfully absent from start to finish.
Realizing that this attempt at bludgeoning an audience into awareness of a major Indian social problem, public unpunished rape, was basically going nowhere and was extremely unpleasant to watch, I joined the steady stream of walkouts after some forty fidgety minutes. I suspect that the only people left in the theater at the bitter end were a dutiful band of jury assessors.
Jurist Ciro Guerra (last years Golden Apricot winner for "Embrace of the Serpent") stated that the justification for the award was that this film courageously draws attention to a major social problem, the public abuse and rape of woman which is rampant and more or less taken for granted in India today. Definitely a national disgrace that needs to be addressed, but not by a film that is so badly made it drives people out of the theater in droves long before it's over.
Malayalam director Sanal Kumar Sasidharan taking the stage to express his thanks and to receive his traditional basket of apricots seemed to be as surprised as the closing ceremony audience that his dull unpleasant film had been named as Golden Apricot Best Film. It was obviously programmed because it had received a similar award at Rotterdam in January by a similarly dazed jury. The award here in Yerevan was clearly for the good human rights Intentions of the director rather than for his filmmaking expertise which was painfully absent from start to finish.