Are we losing the man-nature relationship once at the centre of life? Watch these movies to know

A green landscape, a peaceful sea, a paddy field stretching to the horizon - that is the canvas on which characters are painted in some of the finest recent regional cinema films. These places blend into the lives of the heroes, something few Indian films do now, replete with histrionic camera angles courtesy of 'action gurus' flown in from overseas, choreographed dance routines in some distant foreign locale and, honestly, inhabited largely by bogus characters.

Naturally, the big-budget ones have hundred crore business within a week of the release of the film. In fact, the people wolf it down too, as if they dream about such worlds where they would love to walk around them, or escape into for a while, which is also understandable because they need to tread the twisted alleys of everyday life.

And what about those villagers who work and earn their living, plough the soil, get stranded during monsoon rains, go through the struggles awakened by man and nature? Seeing a couple of films in regional languages made by such iconic directors is like a breath of fresh air, a smell of the earth itself.

Consider, for instance, Village Rockstars 2, the sequel directed by Assamese filmmaker Rima Das to her original film of the same name. Bedridden again by poverty, the teenage protagonist Dhunu still fantasizes about her dream of becoming a rock star as she strums a tune on her guitar in the very improbable setting of a poor village.

She and her friends even have a band that attempts to play at 'town functions' but get driven off routinely. Her father is deceased; her obstinate mother somehow manages to provide two meals. Dhunu assists her mother as much as possible; their relationship is a pleasure to watch. Her older brother gets entangled in bad companions, yet her mother persists in defying her son by refusing to sell her land to a developer. "This is all we have; I don't want to be uprooted," she says.

But life is also sweet for Dhunu, playing in fields among friends, picking at her guitar beneath a tree, fishing. There are the annual floods with the resulting temporary displacement. But then the waters come back and the fertile soil is green and later golden brown with paddy, in a continuous cycle of nature. Her mother dies away, but Dhunu picks up the threads from the low point of grief. Her brother returns to fold because he misses his mother. The twins become close, possibly to face the future side by side.

Will Dhunu turn rock star, then? Guessing is all one can do. Nature appears to become a part of the narrative in this charming tale. The green paddy fields, the distant hills, the beels where villagers go night fishing with fire on bamboo staves, children playing in the fields that have been harvested, provide a glimpse into a world seemingly remote from city lights.

The same countryside backdrop is audible in Sanjeev Sivan's Malayalam film Quiet Flows the Dead (Ozhuki Ozhuki Ozhuki). The film is set against the backwaters of Kerala and talks about Paakaran, a 12-year-old boy belonging to a single mother's family and working as errand boy of the village. He voluntarily waits on everyone and has no time to attend school. His mother is working at a prawn factory. Paakaran gets addicted to his father's vanishing during fishing trips.

When he finds a body floating on water when he goes out fishing, he silently brings it back home at night and cremates it in honor because he fears, as is suggested by the priest, that the agitated ghost of an unclaimed dead body might be wandering around. Maybe his father met the same fate. After all, as the tagline for the movie reminds us, 'Thousands of bodies of the unidentified dead flow in the world's waters, far from home, as their loved ones await their return or at least a chance at a final goodbye'.

But the act gets Paakaran into trouble with the police and even gets him arrested for murder, and only a compassionate cop can rescue him. He is going to bid farewell to his dearly beloved homestead and endearing community to a school in the town, courtesy the cop. Once again, Paakaran's tale is about as much about him as about the community built by Kerala's sparkling backwaters terrain.

Payal Kapadia's Cannes Grand Prix-winning All We Imagine in Lightbegins with strangulation shots, clogged-up Mumbai streets where two Kerala nurses-turned-friends meet in their shared flat; but only when they accompany their co-workers back to the state to escort an ill elderly woman, a nursing-home cook who is elderly, do they have the privilege of looking inward.

Having dinner at a 'restaurant', a casual word for a shanty on the coast, under the light of the moon on a night like this they reflect upon the weaknesses in relationships and concepts that got squashed while running after a livelihood in the city. Tamil movie Angammal by Vipin Radhakrishnan, based on a short film by Perumal Murugan, revolves around a hot-headed rural lady who does not want to wear a blouse and desire to flaunt the tattoos on her arms. Things go wrong when her city-educated doctor-son gets into wedlock with a city-bred girl.

When his in-laws are to come home for a 'discusión', he is embarrassed that his mother is not wearing a blouse and is afraid that he will lose face in front of his would-be-in-laws. This brings the family under stress, but Angammal holds firm. She has always been her own advisor – she rides a motorcycle to distribute milk and vegetables grown at home to other homes. What strikes the eye, apart from the superb performances, is the countryside background with a hillock, its reddish soil representing Angammal's stubbornness. Man and nature, hitherto so intimate with each other since centuries, are losing out in today's age of high-speed 'development'. The landscape spread out in these films once again showcases how human beings are shaped by the environment too, not just by genes.