Neelira
Drama Tamil
A wedding eve in 1988 Sri Lanka turns into a hostage standoff when Indian Army soldiers occupy a family's home overnight.
| Cast: | Naveen Chandra, Sananth, Kapila Venu, Roopa Koduvayur, Vidhu, Sidhu kumaresan, Vincent Nakul, |
|---|---|
| Director: | Someetharan |
| Writer: | Someetharan |
| Editor: | Radha Sridhar |
| Camera: | Selvarathnam Pratheepan |
All Guild Reviews of "Neelira"
A Frustrating Chamber Piece Set in the Sri Lankan Civil War
It is not that a film on the Sri Lankan war must depict all its excesses, but when 'Neelira' forcibly side-steps it, the film’s intentional blind spots turn its vision into a fish-eye
Neelira takes place over one night. There is a note at the end of the film, text on screen, that transcribes the long, arduous journey, from Sri Lanka to Europe, that now lies ahead for one of the characters—Vasuki. That text, pregnant with odyssey, suddenly made the film come alive for a brief second. Then, the film ends. Set in 1988, in Northern Srilanka, Neelira, the first Tamil feature directed by a Sri Lankan Tamilian, begins with the preparation for Vasuki’s wedding—including the logistics of getting permission from the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) and the Sri Lankan army, though we don’t see a scene with the latter. Have they ceded control to the IPFK in this narrative?
Someetharan's Anti-War Film Is a Portrait of War's Human Cost
Director Someetharan's Neelira, starring Naveen Chandra, Roopa Koduvayur and Sananth Reddy, is a chamber drama set in the thick of the Sri Lankan civil war. The film is a straight-forward documentation of the effects of war on the lives of commoners.
There is a scene in director Someetharan’s Neelira where a group of children is playing outdoors in the midst of the Sri Lankan civil war in 1988. One of them blurts," What’s a game without guns?," as they indulge in a shooting game. It takes only one scene to put everything into context. These are children who should be playing hopscotch or hide-and-seek. Instead, they are thinking about shooting each other.
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