A story on Bioscope
Perhaps very few may have seen the news about Delhi-based photographer and filmmaker K.M. Madhusudhanan’s feature film Bioscope, which won the NETPAC jury award in Osian's-Cinefan Film Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema, held in New Delhi last week, which screened over 200 feature and short fiction films from around 40 countries.
Bioscope portrays the story of a man called Diwakaran, who encounters the Bioscope (a film projector) in the early years of the twentieth century being operated by a Frenchman; he purchases the machine to entertain his nearby villages with his films, but is consequently beset by suspicion, superstition and the lack of family support.
Talking about Bioscope, Madhusudhanan said; “I wanted to show the curiosity of the human gaze through the film. The appearance of the bioscope in Kerala was something that drew me even closer to the subject.”
He said that his hero is based on a real figure, Varunni Joseph, who ran Bioscope shows in Kerala in 1907. This story emerged when Madhusudhanan started working on a project about silent films and early cinema in Kerala. He painted an entire series of 35 paintings on silent films, consisting of film reels containing hazy images, and cameras sharing space with the artist’s imagination.
Funded by the NFDC, the film will soon head to various international festivals by December. He also has plans to make a sequel to his film. “Bioscope is the first part of a trilogy. The second part is titled Kannadi Kottaka (Mirror Cinema Hall) and is set in contemporary Kerala. It is about a movie house and three people who are connected to it,” says Madhusudhanan.
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