Kannathil Muthamittal

A Tamil film that begins when a child learns her own story. Amudha turns nine. On her birthday her father tells her something: she is adopted. What is said goes further. Her real mother gave birth in a refugee camp in Sri Lanka and left the baby behind. The girl will not accept it. She runs away, is brought back, goes quiet, and has one demand: to see her mother. The father is a writer. He decides to take her to Sri Lanka to find her, and his wife comes too. From there the film is a search. A camp, a list, a village, a road check and a zone of fighting. The country is at war. The army on one side, an armed movement on the other, and the people of the villages caught between them cannot move. What the narrative is interested in is not war but motherhood: the question of the film is who the mother is, the one who gave birth or the one who raised her, and the narrative gives no single answer. The mother who raised Amudha is its hardest part. The woman joins the journey knowing she may lose her daughter. The child's performance is the spine of it. The narrative loads all its weight onto a nine year old and she carries it. The music is by A. R. Rahman and pulls back deliberately in the scenes set in the war zone. The film won in several categories at India's national cinema awards. P. S. Keerthana, R. Madhavan, Simran and Nandita Das are in the cast. Mani Ratnam directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes films that look at the Sri Lankan civil war and at family drama. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a clear political side; the film keeps both sides of the conflict at a distance and was criticised for it.