Talented documentary producer, director
Shiny Jacob Benjamin is ready with the latest short film In Return Just a Book.
This Malayalam film was part of Indian Panorama, her affords been appreciated
by audience across.
The film interweaves documentary and
fiction to explore the dynamics that connect creativities, bridging space and
time. It attempts to understand how one great imagination may sow the seed of
another original act of creation, taking a quantum jump across geographical
distances and centuries.
It employs the real-life story of how
the life and work of the great Russian master Dostoevsky inspired the Indian
writer, Perumpadavam Sreedharan, to write a novel about him which,
incidentally, became a best-seller.
The film takes Sreedharan on his first
ever visit to Russia and St. Petersburg, a country and a city he had imagined
out of almost nothing, except for his reading in translation of the great
Russian novelists, including Dostoevsky. His journey of discovery starts from
his village in interior Kerala as he recalls how, as he wrote his novel, those
21 days of Dostoyevsky had entrapped him as if his life had caught fire and how
he was entangled in Dostoevsky’s traumatic and troubled personality. His
memories of writing the novel, presented through brief face-to-face encounters
and voice-overs, are supplemented by enacted moments that flash forward to the
present, crystalizing the dynamics of
recollection.
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