There is a chaya kada (tea shop) made of thatched palm fronds and split bamboo stems, its glass cabinets stacked with pazhampori (banana fritters). Tea streams out of a long cloth strainer into frothy milk: ₹7 for a glass. There is a faux well, its rim glistens with beautiful phoney red laterite. A bullock-less cart is mounted with posters of Neelakkuyil, the iconic Malayalam movie of 1954, with Sathyan gazing at a shy Miss Kumari (the actor with the beguiling, doubly virginal screen name). A kolambi (the loudspeaker that resembles a traditional spittoon) spits out a Malayalam song from the 1970s: “Ponveyil manikacha azhinju veenu/ Swarna peethambaram ulanju veenu (The golden drape of sunshine has fallen off/ The yellow wrap has unfurled on its own).”

Nostalgia. You are drenched in its cloudburst as you enter the main venue of the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) in Thiruvananthapuram. And yet, thankfully, this nostalgia is incongruous with the shows that run at the 20th IFFK. It has little to do with the contemporaneity, the sheer edginess, of films, especially the indie ones, that hold your gaze. This IFFK is indie territory: it is a festival of the young and the restless.

Hadi Mohaghegh, a 37-year-old from Iran, has come with Mamiroo, a film of astonishing visual splendour that takes a stark look at life and death. Set against the chalky hills of the Iranian province of Kuh-Gilu-Boir-Ahmad, which is also Mohaghegh’s home, Mamiroo is about an old man who wants to die and his grandson who longs for life. It has less than five minutes of dialogue, but it creates a narrative out of gleaming images. “It is largely autobiographical,” says Mohaghegh about his low-budget film. He speaks in Farsi, translated into English by an interpreter. “I made it with my own money, but I am too ashamed to talk about the budget. It’s that tiny.” Mamiroo won the prestigious New Currents Award at the Busan International Film Festival. But even before that win, Mohaghegh had sent the film for the International Competition of IFFK.

“In my country, IFFK is an important film festival,” says Mohaghegh. “Two years ago, my compatriot Majid Behrouzian’s Parviz won the award for the best film here. It was an important indie film in Iran, and that win resonated greatly with me.” The first film that young Hadi saw, as a six- or seven-year-old, was Amitabh Bachchan’s Andha Kanoon. But his movie has a different visual vocabulary. And it received a full house in a corner of Kerala.

In Thiruvananthapuram, thousands of people are collectively stricken with a chronic case of movie madness and grave cinephilia, for a week in December. It begins with a twitch in the legs that drives them, at 9.30 on a Monday morning, to watch the debut film of a Peruvian: Juan Daniel F Molero’s Videophilia (and Other Viral Syndromes). The hall is packed when I reach. People are sitting in the aisle; a few are standing by the door.

“IFFK is like the Rotterdam of the tropics,” says Molero. “This place is swarming with cinephiles.” He won the Hivos Tiger Award for new talent at the International Film Festival Rotterdam this year. His psychedelic movie tracks the youngsters of Lima, caught between tradition and technology: they make amateur porn using Google Glass and ward off evil by spilling the guts of a black guinea pig.

The audience, displaying severe symptoms — bleary vision, fidgety feet and mild palpitations regarding an available seat for the next film — races out of Videophilia and heads for Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s Assassin. The Taiwanese film director won the Best Director award at Cannes for his movie, which is as languid and as visually glorious as a slow-moving stack of classical Chinese paintings.

Dheepan, which won the Palme d’Or and Justin Kurzel’s new Macbeth, are part of IFFK’s list, but it is the indie movies that set it apart. There is Nir Bergman’s Yona, about one of the greatest Hebrew poets, Yona Wallach; the electric Tangerine, about transgender people on the streets of Los Angeles, shot entirely on iPhone 5s; and Chaayam Poosiya Veedu, by Santosh and Satish Babusenan, which was denied even an ‘A’ certificate by the Central Board of Film Certification, since the filmmakers refused to cut three nude scenes. But the movie made it to the competition section, as IFFK doesn’t ask for censor certificates.

Fans and fandom

Unlike IFFI in Goa last month, which drew just 3,700 delegates from across the country, IFFK has about 12,000 delegates, up from 9,000 in 2014. It is this feverish audience that gives IFFK its character.

A nurse from Kozhikode has taken a week’s leave and come down with her banker husband and daughter to watch the festival. “This has been our ritual for eight years,” says Usha Devi. “It is around the world in 35 movies, since it is tough to watch more than five films a day.” Praveen Chandra Pratap, a cop, is manning the festival crowd at Kairali theatre. He is looking forward to the next morning, his day off, when he can be a spectator rather than a warden. “For the past six years, I came here as a delegate. This time, I am on duty. But every alternate day I can watch movies,” he says with a grin. The 46-year-old even harbours a short film under his creaseless uniform: on P Padmarajan, one of Kerala’s finest filmmakers. It is astonishing how many people at IFFK carry short-film dreams.

This particular strain of cinephilia — for world cinema, art-house adventures — seeped into Malayalis when filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan began the Chitralekha Film Society in 1965 and took international movies to the far corners and colleges of the state. Later, around 1984, the maverick John Abraham formed the Odessa Collective and went around Kerala, collecting funds from the public for his movies. Malayalis, with this dramatic affliction growing in their brain and blood, crowded to IFFI whenever it travelled to Thiruvananthapuram, back in its nomadic days.

Since 1994, when IFFK began, the audience’s yearly ritual in the dark — at once collective and individual — has continued their understanding of cinema. They fell for Kieslowski and Kiarostami; they knew their Bunuel from Bergman; they applauded Almodovar and Antonioni; and they cherished the Makhmalbafs, father Mohsen and daughter Samira.

For Malayalis, the celebrated Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-duk is “Kimki”. Kimki is a Malayali, much like the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Malayalis lean across bus windows to wave at “Kimki” when he is spotted on the street. When he is not here, like this year, they scream “Kim Ki-duk Ki Jai!” thrice before his latest movie, Stop, is screened. In a guerrilla style of filmmaking, he has turned director, scriptwriter, prop-maker, cinematographer and editor for this movie, which has almost no background music. It is a minor film in his repertoire, but his eco outrage against the Fukushima power plant found ardent support in Kerala, where many have marched against the Kudankulam nuclear power plant.

Strangely, this year, “Kimki” and Jafar Panahi have turned indie. Panahi’s Taxi is here. Banned from making movies by the Iranian government, Panahi mounted a camera on the dashboard of a yellow cab, drove around Tehran, spoke to and filmed passengers, and created a movie about the other side of the city — it is film as confession, it is film as revolt.

IFFK pulls into its fold everyone who sees the world in 24 frames per second. A few years ago, sitting in a village in Palakkad, Sudevan and friend Achuthanandan wondered if they should place an ad in the newspapers: Is Anyone Willing to Sponsor Us for IFFK? In 2013, Sudevan’s first feature film, CR. No. 89, had its starburst moment, when it came out of nowhere to win the NETPAC Award for the Best Malayalam Film. In 2015, he was on the screening committee to choose movies for the international competition. That is the mind-bending indie arc at IFFK.

Hitting twenty

But as IFFK gets out of the teens, as it turns 20, it needs to evolve. Filmmaker Sajin Baabu, whose Asthamayam Vare won the Rajatha Chakoram (Audience Award) last year, says it is time to redesign the festival. “We get to see a lot of good movies, which is great, but who watches our movies?” asks the 29-year-old, who wandered for the first time into IFFK 10 years ago and saw his life and understanding of movies transform. He saved every penny and sold his car to make his first feature.

“IFFK, sadly, does not have a place on the world map of festivals,” he says. The Busan festival began 20 years ago, along with IFFK. “While Busan has grown in leaps and bounds and is promoting Korean movies, IFFK doesn’t have a clue about the market.” IFFK needs a parallel film market that will have buyers, distributors, television companies and representatives of other festivals. “Also, the state government should give a subsidy of about ₹25 lakh to perhaps 10 good Malayalam movies.” That is when the festival will become more than a screening of wonderful films to a crowd of crazy cineastes.

As the festival wraps up, about 12,000 people sink into withdrawal symptoms. There is no film to wake up to. There is no known cure for this. There will be a year-long wait before the next indie December. In the interim, one will make do with Mohanlal films, Ajith flicks in Tamil and Bollywood tamasha. The eyes will crave, the legs will twitch — for a cup of tea and 35 movies.

Charmy Harikrishnan is a Thiruvananthapuram-based journalist