Sivan’s Before The Rains
Before the Rains is a landscape movie, a sensuous story of love between an English spice exporter and his married Indian housemaid, shot and directed by Santhosh Sivan in God’s own country, Kerala.
Deepak Chopra in his recommendation compared the movie to E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India” and stories like “In the Bedroom”, “Little Children”, “The Savages”, and was delighted to find such layered sophistication coming from India, via “Before the Rains”.
The official selection of Toronto International Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, Pusan Film Festival and Dubai Film Festival, Before the Rains has won 3 awards in the Houston WorldFest — Best Picture; Best Cinematography: Santosh Sivan; Best Music: Mark Kilian.
Mira Nair recalled the movie as “Unforgettable! A hothouse of sensuality, empire, class and guilt.”
NYT called it “A lavish, beautifully photographed film…”
New York Observer called it “A lovely, sweeping film. Stunning!”
And now, Santosh Sivan was interviewed by American Cinematographer for their July 08 Edition.
The extracts are here, here and here, exclusively for PFC.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Sivan’s office for providing the scans, and thanks Phoenixnu for chasing us up to get it on line!
Tags: Award, Crossover, Deepak Chopra, Mira Nair, Santosh Sivan, World Cinema
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Santosh has said that winning the Best Music Award was the best for him as it was a first that a foreigner has won this award for composing music for an Indian film.
Shot in Kerala and with SS at the helm, I can only imagine how each scene will look like…pure magic…
After a long hiatus we have a RB film coming along. Another film that I’m looking forward to is Aparna Sen’s The Japanese Wife. Quite a twisted tale of love and relationships here. But these 2 movies aren’t to be missed I feel.
Any idea when is BTF releasing in India?
Oh..wow..one thing guys..the quality of posts on PFC is definitely getting better by the day..Pnu..gr8 man!!
this is a beautiful movie but am tad disappointed by the performance of rahul bose…. he could have done better, he just does not emote well in some important scenes…his weakness is hidden by the performances of others .the malayali and the british actors played there part perfectly.
But this a very good movie,superbly executed..the photography is breathtaking and music is great… i hope rahman does something like this but he is wasting his time in stuff like jaane tu.
hats off to santosh sivan for giving out a gem like this
This film was magical and spellbounding from the very first shot to the absolutely last scene. What a beautiful film in every way! Santosh Sivan is a genius!
Just read these extracts and unfortunately came across a spoiler of the film. Not that it matters in a way. I’m still going to watch this film but somehow I just feel I know a little too much now…Damn..
When do we in India get to see the film??
i suggest watching The Yellow Asphalt(Red Roofs), the Israeli film from which Before the Rains is adapted………its much better…….i think Before the rains was too loud visually…….doing less is also an art
i was about to write an article on Before The Rains
I am eagrly waiting for this movie. I am just imagining how much beautiful scenes is waiting there!!
Beyond Doubt, Santosh Sivan is a wizard. Bollywood may not know, his work on Perumtachan(Malayalam), Iruvar(Tamil), Kala Paani(Malayalam)and the recent Anantabhadram (which he directed) are testimony to that. In Anantabhadram, Sivan played football with camrea. That was wizadry at its best. Bollywood folks, seeing is BELIEVING.