Amma Ariyan, which means Report to Mother, was the last film of pioneering Malayalam filmmaker John Abraham. Through the framework of a road movie, Abraham constructs a stirring portrait of revolutionary politics, social resistance and the inevitable disillusionment.
The story is simple – a young man named Purushan, played by Joy Mathew, undertakes a journey to inform a mother about the death of her son. This trip becomes an exploration of the rampant injustice and exploitation, police brutality, radical movements and the misfortune of those who fought hard and lost.
Through the film, we see mothers, mostly silent, standing as stoic witnesses. One asks: why do young men commit suicide?
Abraham isn’t interested in linear storytelling or plot. DOP Venu’s fluid handheld camera gives the film a quasi-documentary aesthetic. Fact, fiction, memory, fragments seamlessly blend together to create an overwhelming sense of anger and tragedy.
Amma Ariyan is also notable for the way in which it was made. Abraham founded a film collective called Odessa, which was designed to uphold cinema as an art form and keep it outside the capitalist structures of production and distribution. Amma Ariyan was crowdsourced and it never released commercially. Abraham went from village to village to raise the funds (by putting on musical performances and skits) as well as to screen it.
Forty years after it was made, the 4K version of Amma Ariyan (painstakingly restored by the Film Heritage Foundation) was screened at the 79th Cannes Film Festival as part of Cannes Classics. Abraham’s urgent call for justice, to be better and do better continues to resonate with audiences.