Directed by : Anish Kuruvilla
Starring : Kamal Kamaraju
I swore to myself never to watch telugu movies (the recent ones) and I don't have respect for most of the telugu stars, their sons, directors and producers. There were many instances where I was understood (or misunderstood) by my friends as somebody who was trying to escape his roots and was trying to look like a film expert. I don't have anything against the cinema of my own language and on the contrary I love some of the old classics and lot of films from the good old 90's. But why I can never watch a telugu cinema anymore and why I couldn't stand the fans of old aged stars and their young sons, I couldn't explain. I think now I can ask those people to watch "Confessions of filmmaker" and find out for themselves why me and several other people like me can't stand the new generation of telugu cinema.
COFM was made by Anish Kuruvilla, who I think has spent more than 10 years in telugu film "industry" chasing his dream only to realize that it was not the right place to make his dream come true. Kamal (the protaganist of the film), like Anish in real life has been working in filmnagar for almost 10 years and in this span he was a co-director, editor and assistant producer and has made some money for himself. But the real issue with him is that he is not doing this to earn his livelihood like others.
The movie starts with Kamal's confession of his love for cinema and why he is going to kill himself. I read several reviews of the movie and I knew that Kamal kills himself in the film but no review has explained why he took that decision. So, I naturally assumed that the guy couldn't fight the system anymore and decides to kill himself. But I was pleasantly surprised after watching this guy's take on cinema and what it really means to him. This guy grew up believing cinema to be his mother, friend and his only love and he just can't take it when his only love in his life betrays him which finally leads to his decision of taking revenge and then killing himself.
Kamal invites his friend Anish to help him shoot a documentary where he would take his revenge. The conversations between Anish and Kamal were so natural that it is unbelievable that , that kind of dialogue was actually written for a movie. Kamal is simply awesome and I kind of liked the accent of Anish's telugu. On this trip of 10 days.. we follow Kamal and like Anish, we think Kamal is taking this too personally and if a producer wants to make trash that's his decision. But slowly we come to know how much this guy loves movies and around this point, the movie kind of reminds us how much we loved the cinema while growing up ....and we see Kamal's point and come to understand him.
There is this beautiful sequence in the movie where Kamal stands for hours on the Tank bund facing the Buddha. Anish thinks he is going mad but he is not just staring into space but he is playing those magical moments from cinema in his head which he grew up watching. The sequences include classics of telugu , hindi and world cinema. I absolutely loved watching those scenes from casablanca, citizen kane, benhur and finally it is dawn with the scene of "dawn of man" from kubrick's 2001.
During the course of the movie Kamal imimates and ridicules most of the leading actors but the one that stands out is of our beloved balayya "babu". As Kamal mimics him we see a message on the screen that reads "You now know whom to blame if I get shot", obviously referring to shooting incident of the producer bellamkonda by bala krishna. Unfortunately, many north indians watching this movie may not get this joke..
At the end of the movie, we see a picture of Kamal's obituary and it reads Kamal Kamaraju, "1997-2007". Brilliant.
I have seen hundreds of telugu films in the past 5 to 10 years...most of them sucked big time, I had a little bit of fun watching a few of them and there were very few of them that I really liked and cherished. But if you ask the list of those movies that I really felt had the NEED to be made ..probably.. COFM is the only one. We needed it. We finally need someone to speak out...what we really feel..
Finally... the one line that I loved the most "Cinema is bigger than us.."
P.S
You can watch this movie on www.confessionsofafilmmaker.com. It costs $5.
