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Vembanad

aka A Lake in Central Kerala 1990 91’ col Malayalam d/s Sivaprasad pc Anna Cine Creations c Ashwani Kaul m Louis Banks lp Aziz, Ranjini, Jayabharati, Babu Namboodiri

An obsessive tale of incest, either consummated or desired, on an island community of fisherfolk. A fisherman rescues a teenage girl from drowning, and is obsessed by her. He rapes her, and in the end, repeating the opening sequences, watches her drown. The narrative strategy is both engrossingly ambiguous and alienating as sequences with images of uncertain status (fantasy, desire, dream, reality) coalesce to form an undifferentiated discourse of a father’s desire for his teenage daughter together with his denial of that desire.

Film