An excerpt from the booklet essay by Dr Omar Ahmed.

A major influence on the observational realism of Ghatashraddha was the work of Satyajit Ray. In fact, Kasaravalli was working in a lineage far closer to Ray and Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu than to his own Parallel Cinema contemporaries. Where Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani were busy dismantling narrative cinema itself, moving into something closer to formal abstraction, Kasaravalli wanted something quieter and more dangerous: a camera that simply watches. The Ray inheritance runs straight through Nani. His wide, uncomprehending stare at the cruelties of the adult world is Apu's stare too, the same use of a child as a moral aperture through which an audience absorbs a world it would rather look away from. But in Ghatashraddha the temperature is quite different. Ray's camera, even inside the family's hunger and grief, never quite gives up on warmth; there is always the sense that dignity might outlast circumstance. Kasaravalli offers no such consolation. Nani's innocence doesn't soften the institution around him, it simply itemises its cruelty with mounting precision, until the boy's disillusionment is total and there is nowhere left for the film, or the viewer, to hide.

The Ozu comparison earns it keep too. Ozu's grammar is famous: a camera set low, near a seated eye-line, holding its shot long after a lesser director would have cut away, letting meaning gather through composition and time rather than being told to the audience through montage. Kasaravalli's ground-level framings of the school, his refusal to punctuate emotion with a cut, come from the same monastic discipline. The camera stays put. It lets the scene's weight settle on its own terms. Except it doesn't stay put, not entirely, and that refusal is where Kasaravalli stops being a disciple and starts being himself. As Yamuna's persecution tightens, so does the camera's nerve: a sudden low push along a tree branch that curls like a snake, more restless movement as the film enters its second half, a final shot that peels away from the schoolteacher through a fence into a wide, damning frame, leaving him stranded inside the very order he helped enforce. Stillness curdles into something closer to hunger. It's as if the camera's patience runs out exactly when the institution's cruelty peaks, and that arc, restraint breaking down into something almost predatory, is the most original thing Kasaravalli does here. It's the moment he stops quoting Ray and Ozu and starts arguing with them.

The soundtrack, such as it is, makes the same argument by other means. B.V. Karanth's score all but disappears, reduced to a ritual theme at the opening and drums at the climax, and the silence in between is not a gap to be filled, it is the film's real style. A cry arrives from off-screen, unplaceable, unattached to anybody we can see, and does more damage than any swell of strings could manage. Kasaravalli is a director who trusts the eye and the ear over rhetoric, right up until the moment he decides rhetoric is exactly what the story needs.

Dr Omar Ahmed’s complete essay, from which this excerpt is taken, appears in the booklet which accompanies the release.