Lijo Jose Pellissery's Jallikattu has been chosen as the country's official entry to the 2021 Oscars in the best foreign language film category. This 2019 Malayalam film tells the story of a massive buffalo and the village that gets involved in hunting it. It's an adaptation of the short story Maoist by S. Hareesh, who recently won the JCB Prize for Literature for his novel Moustache.
The film, currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video, is a singularly kinetic experience. Last year, Lounge caught up with Pellissery after the world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and asked him about the experience of making the film. “The evolution of the short story to what you see now took around two years," he said. "Just because we did not know how to go about it with the animal. I was never convinced with the VFX from any company that we met or any contemporary film that I saw."
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