| 1 | '''Ore Oru Gramathile''' |
| 2 | |
| 3 | |
| 4 | aka Once Upon a Time in a Village |
| 5 | 1987 138’ col Tamil |
| 6 | d K. Jyothi Pandian pc Aries Enterprises |
| 7 | p S. Rangarajan s/lyr Vali c Ranga m Ilaiyaraja |
| 8 | lp Laxmi, Poornam Vishwanathan, Delhi |
| 9 | Ganesh, Arundhati, Nizhalgal Ravi, Beena |
| 10 | Chakravarthy, V.K. Ramaswamy, Senthil Charlie |
| 11 | |
| 12 | |
| 13 | Controversial anti-government film in the |
| 14 | tradition of the DMK propaganda melodrama, |
| 15 | evoked e.g. in the opening cyclone scenes |
| 16 | recalling Thyagabhoomi (1939). Produced in |
| 17 | association with the publishers of Madras’s |
| 18 | mainstream daily The Hindu, the film |
| 19 | anticipates the attacks on the government’s |
| 20 | positive discrimination policy in favour of |
| 21 | ‘scheduled’ castes, better known as Mandal |
| 22 | Commission Recommendations, which helped |
| 23 | bring down the Janata Dal government (1990). |
| 24 | The impoverished upper-caste Brahmin |
| 25 | woman Karupayi (Laxmi) masquerades as a |
| 26 | low-caste Harijan in order to receive a good |
| 27 | education and a good job. She is blackmailed |
| 28 | by a tramp-like figure and eventually arrested |
| 29 | and brought to court. As in the DMK genre, the |
| 30 | trial becomes the place to expound the pros |
| 31 | and cons of the policy and for the heroine to |
| 32 | make her fervent plea that it is unfair to ask |
| 33 | talented upper-caste people to suffer so that |
| 34 | low-caste people may get decent jobs. In |
| 35 | addition, the script places feminist ideas in its |
| 36 | heroine’s speech to bolster its elitist message. |
| 37 | The film uses several folk-music tunes as part |
| 38 | of the rural drama and has a convincing |
| 39 | performance by Laxmi. It was briefly banned |
| 40 | but the Supreme Court eventually cleared it for |
| 41 | public screening. |
| 42 | |
| 43 | [[Film]] |