Veteran Malayalam actor Jalaja walked the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival 2022 on Saturday, for the premiere of late G. Aravindan’s restored film ‘Thamp’, originally titled ‘Thampu’. The actor was joined by Prakash R Nair, son of Thamp’s producer K Raveendranathan Nair, and Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, archivist and movie director, who took the initiative to restore the film.
The movie, which has been restored by the National Heritage mission under the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, was screened as part of the Classics in the ongoing Cannes Film Festival. Shot in black and white, ‘Thamp’ offers a kaleidoscope of life in a small circus. In fact, the cast also included real circus workers, and Aravindan captured many scenes during actual performances and rehearsals - elaborating how these men enraptured simple village folk.
Jalaja was in the midst of her pre-degree, when Aravindan asked her to do a small role in ‘Thamp’. She once said of the film that since she had very few lines, she could concentrate on her performance. Aravindan’s work is celebrated for its reflective silences and is known to be observational.
Aravindan’s son Ramu said in a media statement, “Aravindan’s movies were seen and discussed widely in the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s as carriers of a unique but very specific kind of visual-poetic sensibility. That reputation endured even as a younger generation of viewers and filmmakers grew up. His reflective kind of cinema continued to be discussed. Only this time, it was mostly by word of mouth – good digitisations of these movies were hardly available. Quite ironic for a very visual filmmaker!”
