In the final scene of Adoor Gopalakrishnan‘s film Shadow Kill (Nizhalkuthu), a young man, dressed in black, sets out to perform his first hanging. The young man, Muthu, is the son of the hereditary executioner of the south Indian principality of Travancore. He is a Gandhian nationalist and pacifist who has made speeches in his village against the death penalty. Yet upon his father’s death, during the night before the execution, Muthu accepts the doom of his descent-even though he knows that the boy around whose neck he is about to place the noose is innocent.

Such an end implies that we have just seen (at the Cinema South Film Festival in Sderot, see my post Cinema of the South: Celebrating Sderot and Kerala) a film about how Muthu wrestles with his heritage, resists, and then accepts it. But in fact it is not Muthu but his father, Kaliyappan, who agonizes, from the story’s first scene to its penultimate one, about having killed an innocent man the last time he was called from his village to perform his office. Emulating his hero, Muthu buys a spinning wheel to spin out string, which is taken to the local jail to be made into rope. It’s Kaliyappan who, like the Greek fate-goddess Atropos, cuts the rope-the rope of his last hanging, whose ashes, burnt in ritual and prayer, are a balm that heals the sick and troubled.

In keeping with tradition, on the night prior to the execution, the king’s police officers ply Kaliyappan with liquor and keep him from sleeping (he must not sleep, because his victim is certainly not sleeping this night) by telling him stories. The story that finally helps keep the elderly executioner awake is about a romance between a young teenage girl and an orphan flutist. The girl asks the boy to teach her to play his instrument; when he leaves her to practice, the girl is attacked, raped, and killed by her brother-in-law, who has developed an uncontrollable passion for her. The flute found in her hands implicates the orphan boy; the girl’s family knows who the real murderer is but protects him.

As a policeman tells this story, we see it played before us through Kaliyappan’s eyes. The young girl takes the form of his youngest daughter; the murderer the guise of his son-in-law. When the executioner asks what happened to the boy in the end, the policeman laughs and tells him that this is the boy he is scheduled to hang at dawn. The executioner suffers a seizure and dies, and Muthu is told to take his place.

A Western viewer cannot help but ask why Muthu accedes. Why doesn’t he use his position to challenge and change tradition? It is surprising, and disturbing, that we do not even see him consider this possibility.

The images Gopalakrishnan uses to tell his story perhaps provide a clue. Wind, light, and water stand out as motifs, almost characters in and of themselves, that we encounter time and again. His stunning shots of the village’s houses and fields, and the woods on the slopes of the nearby mountains, convey a sense of timelessness where life and death meet. Indeed, the film is replete with symbols that signify both death and life simultaneously-the rope, the drunken hangman’s arak, menstrual blood, all presided over by the life and death-giving goddess Kali. (The film’s story is based both on a real event and on an ancient Indian legend that I am not acquainted with.) The implication is that Muthu will kill but that he will also give life.

The mystical union of opposites is an element of all faiths. While on a moral level, we might expect Muthu to make a choice, on a personal and inner level we all know that choices are constrained by society, family, and tradition. We applaud those who courageously break free of such constraints when facing moral dilemmas. But Gopalakrishnan helps us gain a profound and instinctive understanding of why, most often, we remain bound by the ropes of fate.

More South Jerusalem on film:

Cold Altruism: Cristian Mungiu’s “Four Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days”

The Selfish Monk: Kim Ki-Duk’s “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter …and Spring”

Sderot was celebrating yesterday–it’s been celebrating all week, in fact. Who cares about the missiles coming over from Gaza when you can catch a good flick–lots of them? The Cinema South Festival, held in Sderot each year under the sponsorship of the film school at adjacent Sapir College, is one of the most stimulating, and heart-warming cultural events on Israel’s calendar.

The day’s only Red Alert happened just as we emerged from our rental car next to the housing project where my daughter, Mizmor (finishing up her first year in the animation program) lives. We scurried to safety–well, it’s all relative–under one of the building’s outdoor stairwells until, seconds later, we heard a distant boom.

After dropping off some home-cooked food in her apartment, we drove over to the Sderot Cinematecque. The festival was in full swing. “South” here doesn’t mean Alabama and Georgia-it means Israel’s poor, forgotten, and bombarded Negev region. Sapir students were quaffing beers and muching on sandwiches and sticky sweets while a Kerala band played songs that sent my wife Ilana-whose late father grew up in Bombay, after his family moved there from Baghdad-into dreamy nostalgia.

Kerala? This year’s festival matched up Israel’s south with India’s south. Keralan director Adoor Gopalakrishnan was on hand for the screening of three of his films. After coffee and sandwiches–I didn’t touch the free Indian sweets since, unfortunately, I was a bit doubtful about their kashrut–we went inside to see Golpalakrishnan’s Shadow Kill  (which I’ll write more about later this week).

The announcement before the film was: “If there is a Red Alert, stay in your places. The screening will continue.”

In his remarks after the film, Golpalakrishnan praised the student films screened that afternoon (we’d planned to catch them, but a flat tire and subsequent complications delayed us). He was particularly surprised and gratified, he said, to see that students were making humorous films under fire.