Kaadu Kudure (1978)

Folklorist Kambhar’s remarkable debut feature, adapting Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba into a surrealist fable. The film tells, through extensive use of verse, the story of Huligonda (Manu), a handsome youth who falls in love with the youngest daughter of a village chief. To marry her he first has to break in the chief’s wild horse. Having done that, the chief tricks him into marrying, not the girl he loves, but her ugly elder sister. He is virtually trapped in the household, representing different kinds of freedom for each of the three sisters and their formidable mother. When the youngest sister is to be married off to a loutish youth, she decides to elope with Huligonda. They sit astride the wild horse, which refuses to move, and are shot dead by the mother.