Art films are serious and independent cinematic creations of great aesthetic value that are usually unconventional, serious, artistic and often experimental in approach with highly symbolic elements. Art films also have qualities like authorial expressiveness of a director, focus on social realism and accent on the inner life of characters. Cinema can captivate and influence the human mind more than any other medium of expression and the proper use of good cinema, whether you call it art cinema or parallel cinema, can bring about progressive changes in the society.
NIV Art Movies realizes the great potential of the art cinema or parallel cinema movement in India. Therefore, it engages in the production and propagation of these films as its contribution to the aesthetic richness of Indian cinema and its social commitment to all that is progressive. It also supports those who take the initiative to produce such films and the organizations that encourage their screening.
The storyline of the movie revolves round an honest man-woman relationship in the backdrop of a natural calamity. Mahendran and Maya are in a relationship. They have their own independent lives even while they are living as a couple. Slowly the relationship ends up in a fiasco and Mahendran the protagonist decides to separate. Maya leaves him and disappears without revealing her whereabouts. But the separation, which is more or less forced and unnatural, causes mental turbulence in Mahendran. His inquisitiveness to find out the whereabouts of Maya mounts slowly and reaches a point when he sets out on a journey in search of her. At the end of the journey he reaches the flood-hit Himalayan valley of Kedarnath. The story develops through the people he meets on the way and his dreams.
On an election holiday, five friends get together for a booze party. Their only intention is fun and refreshment. As the time passes they start to reveal the hidden wildness of their real nature. Tired and bored of unending arguments they plan to play a game - a game they used to play in their childhood.
Durga, a north Indian migrant girl, and a Keralite youth named Kabeer are eloping at midnight. They are waiting for a transport to the nearest railway station to catch a train and reach a distant destination. Two small time gangsters, transporting arms, offer a lift to the couple. The hapless and helpless Durga undergoes physical torture from a cross section of the society through the rest of the night. Parallel to the experience of Durga, another harrowing event intercuts in the film. In a Kerala village, devotees perform 'Garudan Thookkam’, a ritual act of masochism undergone as an offering before Goddess Kali, who represents Goddess Durga's wrath and fury personified.
"Unmadi" (Insane) is a dreamer whose dreams cause disturbances in the society. Strangely people of his land also start seeing the same dreams which Unmadi is seeing. This causes embarrassment everywhere. Rulers fear that Unmadi’s dreams are dangerous and they insist him to censor his dreams before he start seeing them. When he disagrees to the censoring rules, the authorities ban him from dreaming.
Ammu is a girl child transplanted from the polluted city of Delhi to the pristine surroundings of the native place of her mother in central Kerala for health reasons and stays with her grandmother. She immerses herself in Nature whenever she gets a chance to wander around and gets friends of her age including Nani, a slightly elder girl, who is visible only to Ammu. Once, when going around, she is led away by a young man who promises to take her to Nani and the inevitable happens with horrifying implications.