The Malayalam Cinema Today selection was disappointing. In a short essay published in the festival catalog, K. P. Jayakumar notes that Malayalam cinema is in the midst of a crisis brought on by globalization and by the influence of the Hollywood, Tamil, and Hindi film industries on the tastes of the local audience. Instead of following the path of other regional-language cinemas by projecting a valid representation of local identity, Malayalam cinema has so far settled for weakly imitative forms, according to Jayakumar. On the whole, the films in this section bore out this assessment. Even an above-average entry, veteran director T. V. Chandran’s oddly titled Beyond the Wail (Vilaapangalkkappuram), about a Muslim woman who flees from Gujarat to Kerala after the 2002 riots in her home state, suffers from the heavily obvious, over-slick style that dogs, more disastrously, Jayaraj’s Gulmohar and Madhupal’s Thalappavu (which both deal with the Naxalite struggles for land reforms in Kerala in the 1970s). M. Mohanan’s As the Story Unfolds… (Kadhaparayumpol) has some success with its light-comic approach to the problems of rural tradesmen (in particular, a poor village barber) in the face of modernization, but the film wastes its promise in torrents of crude sentimentality. Let’s hope that the best film in the section, Anjali Menon’s Lucky Red Seeds (Manjadikkuru), points to a larger renewal of Malayalam cinema and is not merely an isolated triumph by a gifted and intelligent first-time filmmaker. (Chris Fujiwara)