The film Merku Thodarchi Malai (MTM, Western Ghats, Tamil), written and directed by Lenin Bharathi, manages the near-impossible. It makes the life of a landless labourer in the Western Ghats, fascinating, even moving. A strong debut feature, this socio-political drama is also a coup: it is produced by top Tamil star Vijay Sethupathi (Super Deluxe, 96, Vikram Vedha). It is deeply gratifying that younger filmmakers are also making fiction features based on the real lives of indigenous people of 'the other India'. You can watch this 2018 film on Netflix, and this and other films have been showing for free on the Federation of Film Societies of India (FFSI)'s and/or FFSI Keralam's Facebook pages. In a splendid initiative, both have an FFSI Online Film Festival, showing Indian and Asian independent films in various regional languages, with English subtitles, for free.

MTM opens with the gentle, naive Rangasamy's (Anthony Pangu) routine, as he goes to the tea shop, then labours, carrying heavy sacks of cardamom along the Western Ghats, to the plains. Then, a drone camera swoops up to show us the magnificent Western Ghats where he works—the labourers look like ants in the vast landscape. The first half works like an observational, even anthropological, documentary, with revelatory details of a trusting, generous, closely knit community. They live close to nature, and have simple needs—to find work and get paid, to get married, to own a piece of land. The places have names like Koambai and Kariyanampatti. A tree on the hill is God, and you offer him pebbles. Rangasamy pays for his land in cash; the money lender returns it when the deal is cancelled, nobody signs any receipts. The director also plays with time—the first half of the film mostly mimics real-time, yet, Rangasamy gets married and raises a son in the course of a single song.