Fandry

Regional cinema in India (that excludes Bollywood and the big mainstream Tamil and Telugu movies) occasionally yields little gems like this flick. I heard of it on a news program towards the end of 2014 - the anchor was listing her favorites from the year gone by and she mentioned this as a must-watch inter-caste school love story. That is not quite accurate - the love is deep but one-sided, unrequited, and as one realizes early on, rather hopeless. A low- caste school boy is smitten by the pretty high caste girl that he sees in school every day but centuries of caste stigma are not easily shaken off by sharing the same classroom. The low caste family is routinely humiliated and called upon to trap the wild pigs that roam the village - the rest of the villagers consider the pigs unclean and any contact with the pigs impure. The boy rages against the caste trap and his own father for forcing him to take part in trapping pigs. The movie unfolds slowly for most of its running time, and the high caste characters are almost caricatures in their cruel callousness. Yet, the movie comes alive with a brutal brilliance in the last 10 minutes as shame and fury collide within the tormented boy in an explosive climax. The very last scene is like a punch in the stomach as the raging boy seems to hurl a stone at the audience itself for being mute spectators to injustice.

Wow great movie I saw this in ilInternational Film Festival of Kerala. I personally got a chance to congratulate the director. Such a great movie. Shows how dalits are being treated in society. The man's invention of so called caste, making people uneducated. Its a clear cut of how people are being treated in India due to man's so called invention of caste.

The movie is so simple would like to compare this with Iranian movies. If you love watching Iranian movies then fandry is must watch keeping in mind the simplicity of the acting yet successful in delivering the strong message of living in poverty & suffering from caste discrimination. The film is focused on a young boy who lives below poverty in a village and how he gets caught into superstition to get hold of his love who belongs from an upper caste society...Unlike other Indian movies where scenes are sometimes more emotionally biased, this movie will not make you cry but still will make you think against the three sensitized subjects of poverty, caste discrimination and superstition to some extent..

A must watch movie. I really love the climax portion. I appreciate the director for taking this type of story.

I can even say this is the only movie that I have seen till date which is so authentic in its execution. The story revolves around a young boy(Jabya)who is a victim of the social inequality due to casteism in a village. The entire film drives in a direction where the group of people in the village infuriate the boy by abusing him and his family with his caste calling them "Fandri" (Pig), but he remains calm as his family is dependent on the village. The accumulation of all this anger, fear, fury get outburst in the climax act.

Everyone in the cast has done a extraordinary performance, there is nowhere where you can see any cinematic sequence. This credit should go the director of the movie (Nagraj Manjule). The amount of ground work that is there in this movie is enormous. Every single detail on the character, or the locations and sequence is something really unbelievable. One thing that can be quoted for instance is the place where Jabya's sister asks water in one of the homes when she runs and gasps. The anonymous character from the home doesn't hands over the water to her instead keeps it down to avoid the touch of inferior caste.

In the era of highly moving camera and fast action cuts, the camera work in the movie just shows the power of still cinematography which elevated the movie to the much higher level.

The movie is just one great masterpiece from the debut director !