Adoor Gopalakrishnan, India s most distinguished contemporary filmmaker, has made eleven award-winning films and over forty documentaries, most of which are set in his native state of Kerala, in southern India. A 1965 graduate of the Film and Television Institute of Pune, his first film, Swayamvaram (1972), heralded the New Wave in Kerala. The region s displacement from a princely feudal state into twentieth-century modernity forms the backdrop to most of his complex narratives about identity, selfhood and otherness, in which innocence is often at stake and characters grapple with their...