Berlinale 2026: How 'Kutti' Documentaries and Drinking Inspired Director R Gowtham to Make 'Members of the Problematic Family'

Filmmaker R Gowtham’s debut Tamil feature Members of the Problematic Family will premiere at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival in the Forum sidebar, which, “aim[s] to expand the understanding of what film is, to test the boundaries of convention and open up fresh perspectives to help grasp cinema and how it relates to the world in new ways.”

A perfect addition to this sidebar, alongside films that are experimenting with form, time, and narrative, Members of the Problematic Family exhibits the chaos—equal parts poignant, violent, comical, and tragic—around a funeral, challenging what we think of as a cohesive film.

Gowtham cites the 19th century German writer Goethe’s Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings as a manifesto for his fragmented and energetic cinema, “If you understand something, I am doing something wrong.”

Shot for around a month in Red Hills, a suburb in the northwestern part of Chennai, the film, according to a poet friend of Gowtham, Shankar Rama Subramanian, “shows the current decay of the Tamil OBC family.”

In a conversation with THR India, edited for length and clarity, Gowtham outlines his journey into and vision for cinema...

How did you come into cinema?

Until I was nine-ten years old, I lived in a suburb near Mayiladuthurai, from where writers like Kalki Krishnamurthy emerged. My whole family was into movies. We would watch the same movie twice. Then, I grew up in the northern suburbs of Chennai, pursuing a degree in commerce. I got into cinema through street theatre. It was there that I met Bramma, known for films like Kuttram Kadithal (2015) and the web-show Suzhal (2022-25). He became my mentor. I was also preparing for UPSC—I failed that, didn’t clear the preliminaries. But we had a lot of time to prepare, and for at least five years we were with books. But instead of textbooks, I was reading Tamil literature and poetry. Later, I worked as a rural program manager for NGOs and HR in hospitals. I took a long turn and came to the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ) in Chennai as a research assistant. 

Then, at AsiaVille, I headed content, doing short documentaries, shot with the phone. We even introduced the “Kutti Documentaries” format—15-minute ground reports. During COVID-19 we never took leave, stayed fully busy. Meanwhile PS Vinothraj made Koozhangal. The lead actor of that film was my roommate. I used to frequently visit them during post-production. With our broken English, we wrote the synopsis of that film and sent it to the International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR), where it premiered. Then, I thought it was my turn to make a film.

The Tamil films you saw growing up are very different from this film. Didn't you want to make the kind of movies you watched growing up? 

There is a vibrant cinema culture here. We were introduced to Latin American directors like Glauber Rocha through the writings of Charu Nivedita. We also loved watching director Hari’s Singham movies. But Tamil, and specifically Tamil OBC mentality, is about going to enjoy movies, happy with what happens on screen, not wanting to become that. Despite attending all FDFS shows, we were against that. We were bullish. We wanted to make films about how we spoke when we were drunk, like an MRI and a CT scan of my world. 

Did you bring what you learned from making “kutti documentaries” into your cinema? 

When we shoot documentaries, when things go wrong, it is an opportunity to shoot whatever you want. You don’t control things. But on a fiction film, I have written a script, with a shot-list. During the shoot every morning I was nervous, and every night I was happy. Besides, we have been losing for a long time. What happens if we fail one more time? 

What drew you to this story to make your debut? 

My family is full of drinkers—there are a few exceptions, but I have seen my uncle and cousins succumb to alcohol. Some came back. Others couldn’t. Since we didn’t have the luxury to go elsewhere, we fixed the location, the actors, and with whatever was available we made the film. 

Tell me about the style of the film. The visual aesthetic is trying to mimic the documentary. But also, the narrative is fractured, where instead of a scene having a beginning-middle-end, it explodes, recedes, meanders. There is no set pattern to what a scene is trying to “do”. Did this method come easily? 

In the initial stage of writing, on Saturday nights we would all sit, drink, discuss, and later forget and move on with our lives. I idea was to let the film be like how I was. See, I cannot narrate a story. The film is also like the way I talk. I write poetry, fragments. Even my mentors would try and instil focus in me—they all failed. 

In the film, we did not want to reveal information. People complain they cannot understand how the characters are related to each other. But, for example, in Tamil families, there is no equivalent word for 'cousin'. It is “thambi” (younger brother) or “annan” (elder brother). If you say, he is my “uncle’s son”, they will get furious. After all, they are brothers. Within the clan and caste, they are tightly knit, and that is the only way they know how to show affection. They shout at you to tell you that they love you. 

Besides, when we do something, we should contribute to cinema. If form and technique is contributed by Soviet, German, and American filmmakers, what is Tamil cinema’s contribution? We have taken plenty from cinema... what do we give back in terms of form and technique? That is what we have tried.