For decades, the Malayalam film industry has produced great non-commercial cinema. These essentially catered to much smaller audiences than those to reach the masses. “Art Films”, as they were called, never had much appeal among families. It simply wasn’t practical to take children to the cinema to watch slow films with philosophical themes. 'Nadodikattu' or 'Manichitrathazhu', on the other hand, were the kinds of films that all of us, young and old, adults and children, could watch at any number of times.

Before the pandemic and the era of online movie platforms, I did not know a single non-Keralite who would watch commercial Malayalam films. But now, they seem to be quite the rage!

My first pleasant shock came in August 2024 in the Sri Lankan city of Kandy, which has a sizable number of Tamil speakers. At the old hill capital’s Egyptian Cultural Centre (once the home of the exiled revolutionary Orabi Pasha), I met a young employee who could speak fairly good Malayalam. When I asked her how she learned the language in the country, she said it was easier for her since she was a Muslim (the community on the island are native Tamil speakers), but attributed her proficiency to Malayalam films available on online platforms. She said some of her college friends were also fans of Malayalam movies and film stars.

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Hindi cinema’s popularity has also enabled quite a few Sinhalese on the island to learn some phrases or get a decent understanding of the language. The same is true in some other countries in Southeast Asia and former Soviet republics, although the films are often dubbed there.

A little over a month before this pleasant conversation in Kandy, I watched exceptional filmmaker Prasanna Vithanage’s film 'Paradise' on the first day in Colombo. I may have been the only person in the cinema hall who could understand all five languages (Malayalam, English, Sinhala, Tamil and Hindi) used in the primarily Malayalam film, set in Sri Lanka during the 2022 economic crisis, without the assistance of subtitles. My Sinhalese friends who saw the film picked up a few odd Malayalam words that had the same meaning in Sinhala. I didn’t tell them that every single one of them was of Tamil origin.

Vithanage’s film justifiably got very good reviews from the press and did well in Sri Lanka, as it did in India, where many Malayalis fell in love with Lankan landscapes and started making plans to visit the island. It also won the Kim Jiseok Award at the Busan International Film Festival in 2023.

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However, no film spread the Malayalam language as far and wide as Payal Kapadia’s 'All We Imagine As Light', which won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2024, along with other awards and nominations in other international festivals.

Surprisingly, the Malayalam media, which celebrates the success of anything with even a remote link to Kerala, has not claimed the film. It would resonate highly with the Malayali diaspora nursing community. It’s a rare film that showcases these unsung heroes who are spread far and wide across the world. It is also one of those rare depictions of Malayali life in Mumbai.

'All We Imagine as Light' has a chance to win more awards this year, too. It will undoubtedly generate more than an academic interest in the Malayalam language and the multilingual melting pot that is Mumbai.

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Along with food, films are the best way to spread soft power and goodwill. Affluent Malayali businessmen and the authorities in Kerala should support cinema that takes Malayalam to a much wider global audience. If food and cinema can generate even a fraction of the interest and goodwill for Kerala that it has for South Korea, then it would bring immense benefits to the state.

In the meantime, we can all be pleased about how Malayalam is now spreading far beyond the associations formed by the diaspora in other parts of India and the world. We have great filmmakers such as Prasanna Vithanage and Payal Kapadia to thank for this.

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