S P E C T R U M, Short fictional film, 17 minutes, 2023
Teaser: https://youtu.be/eHKQPy0zf-4
A short experimental film on trauma, memory and deterritorialization.
https://vimeo.com/756104123
‘The Colour of My Breath’ is a short collaborative documentary featuring 5 immigrant artists living in Ireland, dealing with the subject matter of cultural integration. The project lasted six months and exercised collaborative filmmaking methodologies to the utmost during the process with deep inputs in all aspects of filmmaking from the participants. The short film is supported by the Communities Integration Fund from the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. This project is also supported by Create, the national agency for collaborative arts and the Arts Council’s Artist in the Community Scheme
Teaser: https://youtu.be/uc5opfHuGR8
Whole film: https://vimeo.com/579375942
Satori, Short film (2019),17 min
Satori is an experimental, collaborative, personal, non-narrative, non-linear short film attempting to paint a portrait of a young Indian immigrant in Dublin. In this project, which challenges essentialism and categorization, I collaborated primarily with a single individual investigating his life in a documentary style, infusing it with my own life stories effecting a montage of visuals, values, and aesthetics. The project duration was ten months with nine collaborators. Teaser: https://youtu.be/4VWVT6JYarM Whole film: https://youtu.be/ymwusaEsrnc
Box is a short film made in collaboration with Neuron, a Malayalee community of left-wing rationalists, supported by Arts Council Ireland through ‘Artist in the Community’ scheme, managed by Create Ireland. It explores religious extremism, racial and religious prejudice, social freedom in insular minority communities and feminism, among many other things in an Irish intercultural context. The project duration was one-year with 32 collaborators and a budget of 10,000 Euro.
Teaser: https://youtu.be/6KaDMSk7mhQ
Whole film: https://youtu.be/UxY4kPZmcgQ
This short film on immigrant angst is a dark comedy, the result of my collaboration with a Keralite/Malayalee family. With six collaborators, the project lasted six months and was filmed in suburban Dublin. Positioning itself within post colonialism, Parakayapravesham explores the identity crisis of a conservative immigrant father of three. The film narrative is sympathetic towards conserving the identity and integrity of the middle-aged father, who articulates his disdain for homogenization within neoliberalism, this is channeled into the narrative through the characters of the children. With distinct postmodern uncertainty, it reflects the contrasting frames of reference of the collaborators and makes a conscious attempt at viewing the world from the margins while making tongue in cheek comments on western culture. Teaser: https://youtu.be/aazUu69ZtRQ Whole film: https://youtu.be/YodBc-bfJs0
Vattam (The Circle), Short film (2014), 28 min
Considering many of my collaborators interest, Vattam with its unique combination of complex narrative structure, surreal elements, dark comic tone and stylized acting underlined by a music score is an attempt at the mystery thriller genre. It deals with in-group politics in the community, focusing on the process of conforming individualistic strains to the larger conservative agenda of religiosity and the rule of the church — symbolized as authoritarian criminal organizations in the film. Members from two Kerala theatre groups in Ireland, Imandala and IFC Dublin participated in the project, which with a total of 22 participants and collaborators, it took 6 months to complete. Teaser: https://youtu.be/dxMbtpZZIwA Whole film: https://youtu.be/xw6g8NST0x0
Similarity is a character driven, metafictional drama where a slow witted, hot tempered, unsophisticated Malayalee male character drives a comic narrative with differences in personality type, social class and lifestyle among Keralite immigrants as the main subject matter. With seven collaborators, the project duration was 3 months and filming took place in suburban Dublin. Shot in a day on two consumer grade camcorders at a friend’s house with audio dubbed using a laptop microphone with free audio software, the project was realized with many production and direction flaws. However, my philosophy of DIY zero budget films continued to be a key production method. Most of the improvised acting turned out to be inconsistent in style and I struggled during editing to build a formally stable narrative with very limited usable footage. To devise a style for the film in keeping with my aforementioned non-mainstream aesthetics, and yet suitable to accommodate collaborators performances was a challenge. Whole film: https://youtu.be/3DzHbwiW2-A
Happy Independence Day is a short film project where I collaborated primarily with a family of four. All were of Keralite origin but were born and brought up in different parts of the world. The film production was a duration of two months. This melodramatic short film primarily deals with the acculturative stress experienced by a pair of recently migrated Keralite teenagers. The sudden culture shock and discrimination pushes them into a liminal space where they identify themselves as sandwiched between first and second generation immigrants and undergo an identity crisis forcing them to take a binary position, to either assimilate or segregate rather than integrate. With a total of 6 participants, filming took place in Suburban Dublin inside and around the collaborating members’ homes. Whole film: https://youtu.be/_oOgUhmKkts
Duality Show, my first fictional project in Ireland – a collaborative venture between myself and a Keralite/Malayalee music organization called Mehphil. explores the possibilities of the reality/fiction dichotomy through a metafictional, experimental plot, a tension created by the differences in the two worlds a new immigrant inhabits — the world she/he left behind and the world she/he lives in the present. Filmed over a period of six-months in Surburban Dublin, the film production includes 17 participants. The passion and naivety involved, the act of forming a film society to drive the production, mustering support of the whole community to rally behind the project and the free public release of the film into the community itself are all factors which find synergy with the production and distribution strategy of maverick Kerala filmmaker, John Abraham. The Odessa film collective which John founded drove his productions by resourcing funds and in kind support from villagers. Odessa conducted public open film screenings in the villages of Kerala making filmmaking an activist undertaking with collaborative overtones, empowering ordinary people in the process. Teaser: https://youtu.be/eoxXnXciaXU Whole film: https://youtu.be/fGqUJ1mBlRQ
Moonam Lokam (The Third World)
Telefilm (2010), 1 hr 50 min. A DIY zero budget participatory project. Teaser: https://youtu.be/Pdf7ywW0WOQ Whole film: https://youtu.be/I7i_r0Arg3g
Jijo Sebastian Palatty 