S. Viswanath

S. Viswanath is the co-author of ‘Random reflections: kaleidoscopic musings on Kannada cinema’, and a film critic with over 30 years experience reviewing Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Hindi and English films. He has served on the jury of several international film festivals, and officiates as the world cinema curator of the Bengaluru International Film Festival (BIFFES).
  • BIFFes 2025

    BIFFes 2025

    Shabana Azmi conferred Lifetime Achievement Award at the Bengaluru International Film Festival (BIFFes) 2025. When captivating cinemas of the world held cinephiles in a thrall. Other highlights of the festival: 37 films by women directors, retrospectives of Polish filmmaker Krysztof Kieslowski & German Wim Wenders, and a day long...
  • Shivamma

    Shivamma: shackled, & snared in survival strife

    Kannada’s other, in familiar parlance – art house cinema – has never really scaled up to its glorious past of the 70s when Girish Kasarvalli, B V Karanth, Girish Karnad, and their proteges and the like, ruled the roost ensuring their regionally rooted films became part of the larger...
  • Southern Sonata

    Southern sonata: a kaleidoscope of contemporary Asian cinemas

    Southern sonata southern southern With the global pandemic, unrelenting in its pervasive, octopus grip, social interactions, in public spaces, have been dictated by Standard Operating Procedures of physical distancing and masking. So much so, the annual film festivals, that run on precise set calendar dates, have had to rework...