Pain of Being the Alien, the Marginalised

By?Sreejith Kamalanayanan

?An immigrant’s life is torn between the memories of being at the centre of his homeland and the reality of being marginalised somewhere else, where he is destined to live the rest of his life. While most of the films run the risk of resorting to stereotypes, cliches and nostalgia when trying to tell the story of Indians living outside the country, Ireland-based Malayali short filmmaker Jijo S Palatty explores the philosophical aspect of an immigrant’s existence.

Palatty’s film Parakayapravesam (To Take Another Human Form) has been screened at the ViBGYOR International Short Film and Documentary Film Festival 2014, Thrissur, and will be shown at the prestigious International Short Film Festival of Uruguay in April.

The movie shows an Indian immigrant’s loneliness, seclusion, and stuck-in-a-rut, marginalised lifestyle in Europe. The protagonist is a symbol of male chauvinism and the old world order. He refuses to eat with cutlery or wear a blazer. On his son’s birthday, he tries to present the five-year-old with a rubber waste ball he himself had grown up playing with, back in India.

Due to his poor English, communication fails between them. Desperate to connect with his son, he decides to obey the instructions he received from his daughter in order to change into the modern gentleman: ‘stand straight, walk straight, and speak straight forward.’

In an impulse to act out on the instructions, he puts on the blazer and walks up to an acquaintance’s house to reveal to him that he had seen his wife with another man many times. It backfires and he is beaten up. Defeated and demoralised, he retreats indoors and walks up and down the room in anger. He vents his frustration by throwing away the blazer and gives a long shriek at the camera.

“Being marginal is a new thing to all of us,” says Palatty. “Back home we lived in the mainstream. This conflict between our desire to have a mainstream life and at the same time fearful of the extremely different and foreign way of life of the natives with cultural and racial barriers in place poses the inevitable question who and what am I in this place? Immigrant identity, roots and dreams are my raw material.”

Like other immigrants from Kerala, Palatty’s life revolves around the small Malayali community in Ireland. None of the activities by the community involves the natives other than sharing the workspace. So, his films have never featured an Irish or a non-Indian actor. The Malayali film society in Ireland helps bring people interested in the film together. Actors are few. Most of the crew are laymen trying to learn the art.

Palatty is a proponent of low-budget filmmaking. He usually finds a few actors and tries to understand their personality. He then builds a character around that, and weaves a story.

Though Palatty is far removed from his homeland, he has never been a ‘prisoner of nostalgia’. “An immigrant should redefine his identity to find a place in the social hierarchy,” he says. “In refusing to do so, he will be stuck in a nostalgic fairyland.”

This article was originally published in The New Indian Express on 05th April 2014. Read the Original at : https://www.newindianexpress.com/entertainment/malayalam/2014/apr/06/Pain-of-Being-the-Alien-the-Marginalised-594933.html