WHEN a small, unassuming film ambles into international festivals from an unlikely location—especially one marked by bucolic poverty—the jaded cinemagoer pauses. Never mind how many awards it has won. Are we here to see a movie, or to perform some duty of social conscience? Nor is it reassuring to hear that “Thithi” takes its time; stays focused on village life; and cannot be categorised as either drama, comedy or any other genre. But give yourself to the first few minutes of this spectacularly assured story and abandon all doubt. It starts in a tumbledown village somewhere between Mysore and Bangalore, neither under- nor overplayed in its squalor, with a touch of rustic grace on the side. Without pause, the most ordinary things happen, and happen and happen, but every scene comes as a surprise. “Thithi” opens with the death of a man who is 101 years old. “Century” Gowda, as he has been called for the final year or two of his life, keels over during a languid routine of heckling passers-by. His son, himself a wizened old man, is nonplussed by the news; he looks like an eccentric, or maybe the village drunk—Gadappa they call him, “beard man”. He spends his days pottering around the fields, smoking bidis and drinking cheap brandy, sometimes playing a board game of his own invention with schoolchildren.

Century’s grandson is called upon to get the plot moving. With Gadappa indifferent to the world of social propriety, it falls to Thamman to bring together the inevitable thithi: an extravagant mourning ritual required 11 days after the death of any Gowda man. He enlists his own son, a pleasant teenaged boy with a cranky motorbike who might otherwise stay crouched over the porn he has recorded on his phone.

Will the three surviving Gowda men manage to pull off a decent thithi? The family astrologer relishes telling them they should serve up a bunch of sheep, but that will be expensive. On the face of it, this is the main worry of the family man. But beneath that wholesome obligation, he has found a much thornier problem: his family’s five acres were in Century’s name, and for some maddening reason the otherworldly Gadappa cannot be bothered to do the paperwork it would take to pass the deed to his worldly son. So Thamman contrives to make his father disappear prematurely, that he may sell off the lands. As he weaves a web of lies, he is forced to borrow, beg and steal from an array of unsavoury characters in nearby villages.

This is extraordinary stuff from which to make a film that wins a Golden Leopard at Locarno and Best Film at Shanghai. “Thithi” is not just from India, but in the Kannada language of the southern state of Karnataka. About as many people speak Kannada as speak Polish, and significantly more than speak Burmese, but it counts as a merely regional language in India, and not even one of the Dravidian tongues with a highly developed commercial cinema (Tamil and Telugu). In recent decades the only films that have attracted much attention abroad were shot in Hindi, either the big-budget crowd-pleasers of Bollywood or the “parallel” cinema of social realism and pathetic box offices. With another small, serious film in Marathi, “Sairat”, it might be possible that “Thithi” is the start of a wave of inventive cinema from India’s non-Hindi-speaking majority.

Serious, but also hilarious. The plotting is dense without being difficult. In a story about four generations of men, many of the best lines go to women, and to one incredibly foul-mouthed moneylender in particular. Many of the bit parts are supremely memorable. A bicyclist, unjustly tipped off balance by the teenaged Romeo, raises his hand in a gesture for the ages: at once threatening, pleading and forgiving—and the scene cuts. One little old lady, maybe 90 years old, giggles in a way that makes us picture her sexual indiscretions from the 1940s. The actors are all non-professionals, playing characters based on the very people who happen to be playing them. The screenwriter is a Gowda, native to the village in which they shot. The director, a 26-year-old named Raam Reddy, produced the film with other South Indians and a few foreigners.

The humour is earthy, often to the point of bitterness. Mundane scarcity and social pressures encroach on all the characters at all times, except maybe Gadappa, who manages to stay sozzled and mystical at the same time. The holy necessity of a funeral, or the love between husband and wife, or the duty of a lawyer to the law—the story takes each in turn, and takes the piss mercilessly. Specific amounts of rupees are matters of constant discussion. The mating behaviour comes straight out of the animal kingdom. It is not so much a dark comedy, nor a light drama, as it is a charming spectacle of unadornment.

As the logic of these four lives reaches its end, a spiritual dimension emerges. It could be missed easily enough. One of the last two images in the film is a static shot of an audience, settling into red plastic chairs before a makeshift stage, facing the camera in jolly anticipation of their evening entertainment. The band strikes up, they shift and settle in their chairs, some looking pleased, other perplexed, others sleepy. They are us, at the movies, in society. (It’s an effect Mr Reddy might have adapted from Martin Scorsese.) The next shot is far away, with a solitary man in the dark with a fire. He has reached the truth.

Ancient Hindu thought divides the four proper phases of a man’s life into ashramas. The first belongs to the Brahmacharya, a celibate time of learning. Next comes the Grihastha, or householder: he builds his family and minds their place in society. The Vanaprastha withdraws gradually from the world and finally the Sanyasa has withdrawn. It will not spoil anything of “Thithi” to note that its four Gowdas are making their passages simultaneously, each moving from one phase to the next.

But this movie is prepared to laugh off any interpretation, or at least to slough it off its shoulders. It could not be less metaphysical. The feeling of these characters, their homes and fields, and hangovers, is nearly strong enough to smell. With them we feel the tragedy of ageing as something both painful and sweet.