Anoop Lokkur's quietly moving coming-of-age film Don't Tell Mother, which premiered at the Busan International Film Festival last week, delivers a semi-autobiographical look at life in Bangalore in the 1990s tinged with both nostalgia and the ambient specter of violence.
Much of the story is seen through the lens of 9-year-old Aakash (Siddharth Swaroop), who is trying to navigate the transition from the carefree innocence of childhood to the looming pressures of the adult world. Verbal threats abound, from parents to school bullies, while classroom punishments grow increasingly severe.
In one of the film's pivotal scenes, a brutal math teacher takes things to an extreme, thrashing Aakash across his back and leaving welts.
"When you're a kid, they'll give you chocolates," Aakash wearily tells his younger brother Adi (Anirudh P. Keserker), who idolizes him. "As you grow up, they'll give you beatings."
A key plotline finds Aakash trying to hide the marks from his strict-but-loving mother, Lakshmi (Aishwarya Dinesh), for fear of angering her. That scenario was drawn from Lokkur's own life -- and in fact, he managed to keep the secret all the way until the film's premiere.
"I never told my mom," Lokkur told UPI in an interview in Busan. "She actually found out when she watched the film."
The director said the idea for his debut feature came to him while discussing corporal punishment for children with his wife, who is American.
"We had opposite views because she's from the States, but I'm from India," he said. "And I was hit as a kid: my parents hit me, my grandparents hit me, my teachers hit me. So I was thinking it's fine."
His wife, however, pushed back, prompting Lokkur to reflect on the environment of his childhood.
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"It's systemic in nature," he said. "My grandparents hit my parents, so they thought it was okay to hit me. So you need to break out of this cycle, and that's when I was like: 'How do I make this into a film?'"
Apart from a pair of traumatic events, one involving Aakash's younger brother Adi, most of Don't Tell Mother is hinted at rather than shouted, its story told among the rituals and routines of domestic life rooted in a specific time and place.
Lokkur said he drew inspiration from directors such as Japan's Hirokazu Kore-eda and Taiwan's Edward Yang, who tell powerful human stories with cinematic restraint.
"Through them, I understood that suggestion can be stronger than explanation," he said. "I didn't want to sensationalize or overdramatize anything because I feel like subtlety is so important in cinema."
Lokkur also explores the limitations imposed on the family's wife and mother, Lakshmi, who dreams of a life beyond her housekeeping duties.
When she is given a chance to work with a friend in a catering company, her ambitions are thwarted by her father-in-law, who finds a mother going into business unseemly.
"I had so many dreams and wanted to do so much in my life," she eventually exclaims to her husband. "Now I'm slowly dying in the kitchen."
Lokkur said that his own mother faced a similarly stifling experience after getting married at age 18 in an arranged ceremony.
"She made sure to let us know not to take anything for granted, because we have the freedom and opportunity to do what we want when she did not have that," he said. "I'm glad she opened up about those things with us as kids."
Lokkur said he was nervous about his parents and brother seeing the film at its premiere but was reassured by their reactions.
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"They really loved it," he said. "My mother -- if you ask her now, she'll deny it, but I know she was in tears. My dad also, I'm pretty sure, was in tears."
"They said it brought back so many memories for them," he added. "Obviously, that's what every kid wants to hear -- that they're proud of me."
Don't Tell Mother was screened in BIFF's A Window on Asian Cinema section. It was produced by Papunu Films.