Adoor Gopalakrishnan has made relatively few films during his around five-decade span as filmmaker. In 2016, he made Pinneyum (Once Again) in Malayalam. This, based on the true story of a criminal who was never caught was distanced from his in-depth approach to identity and the psyche of his protagonist. It did not get much positive reviews. Padayatra, the film he is now making, marks a decade of gap in his journey as one of the greatest living filmmakers in the country.

The film is inspired by a notorious 1980s Kerala crime involving insurance fraud, murder, and an attempt to fake a person's death. In 1984, a man, Sukumara Kurup. planned to fake his own death to claim a substantial insurance payout of Rs 50 lakh. Kurup and his accomplices (including family members) targeted a stranger named Chacko, who had asked for a lift near Karuvatta in the Alappuzha district. Chacko was strangled to death in a car. The perpetrators then burned the body and the vehicle, attempting to make it look as if Kurup had died in the incident. The case became one of Kerala's most famous, yet unresolved, criminal cases because the perpetrator (Kurup) did not resurface and the planned deception failed to work as intended because the dead body was identified as belonging to someone else.

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Once Again revolves around Purushottaman, married to Devi. They have a daughter, six, when the flashback begins. The problem is that Purushottamanis unemployed and lives off his wife’s meager earnings as a schoolteacher. Devi is the sole income earner in the family. Though he loves his wife dearly, his father-in-law does not approve of his living off his daughter’s earnings what with the burden of his mentally challenged son Kurup who is unable to work for a living.

“I interact with the medium of cinema by choosing a human being placed in a certain situation. It may be a village simpleton, a disillusioned political worker or a writer as the case may interest my creative instincts and me. It is their existential situation that my film explores. None of this can be summed up through a slogan," he adds. Adoor insistently refuses to reduce any of his narratives to a cause-and-effect confrontation between the lily-white and the pitch-black. In fact, in a very understated way, his films deal with human 'absences' and sometimes, small 'presences' that mark that........

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