Revenge is a sweet watch, however morbid it can be. IT professional Indu V.R.’s new short film Alikhitham –The Unwritten is an attempt to satisfy our baser instinct to right those wrongs that happen in society, even if it means taking the law into our own hands.
The 10-minute, gripping short film won a prize in an intra-company short film contest and is gradually catching the eye of short films buffs on YouTube. The film, written and directed by Indu, tells the tale of a father’s revenge on the man who raped and murdered his young daughter; an ordinary man who decides to take the law into his own hands when the system fails to do so. It also talks about the emotional and psychological toll of his actions on himself, a nod to the trauma that families of the victims of sexual attacks also undergo, which often goes unwritten.
Indu V.R.
“In several of the sexual abuse cases we hear of nowadays, the perpetrator of the crime sometimes goes scot free. Point in case is the Soumya murder that rocked Kerala a few years ago. That judgement really bothered me and I felt that the accused was not punished enough. I wanted to tell a tale of justice served in a different way. The clippings shown in the end are actual newspaper clippings about sexual crimes that happened in the state,”says Indu, a senior software engineer and an aspiring scenarist. “Initially, I had only written the script for the short, only I couldn’t find a director. So, I decided to do it myself even though I knew nothing about helming a film. It was a learning curve,” she adds.
There are no dialogues in the film and music is what takes the story forward. The haunting score was composed by Mikku Kavil, with lyrics written by Indu herself and it was sung by Rakesh Kishore of Malarvadi Arts Club fame. One of Indu’s colleagues Manu Nair plays the lead role, while Ram Gopal and Prince K.J., also colleagues, handled the camera.
