Review: Pechi (2024)

Set in 1989 Tamil Nadu, Abilash Selvamani’s Pechi is a short film rooted in a specific historical moment. It emerges as a stark, unflinching portrait of oppression and survival, and feels both anchored in past and eerily resonant with the India of today. The period may be decades removed, yet the social hierarchies it examines remain painfully recognisable. What emerges is a spare, quietly devastating account of a man whose life is upended by a single, cruel twist of fate, and by a system designed to crush men like him.

Mariyappan (Rajmuthu), a polio-affected shepherd living on the margins of an already marginalised world, learns that his mother has died. The news comes from his neighbour Chandran, followed swiftly by a reminder. He must return home and settle his debt with the domineering Kaathavarayan. Lacking money and mobility, Mariyappan turns to his landlord for help, only to be dismissed and saddled instead with the lone asset he can claim, his goat, Pechi. What follows is a journey shaped as much by geography as by caste, with Mariyappan crossing scorching fields, rocky hills and open, unyielding plains as he attempts to reach a village that refuses to accept his very presence.

Selvamani’s narrative unfolds in a land where people are routinely dehumanised. The vast, empty stretches of rural Tamil Nadu become a metaphor for erasure, of rights, of dignity, of belonging. Yet nature remains a mute witness to the unspeakable violence that thrives in the cracks of caste and power. Fields serve as cover; boulders offer vantage points; the desert heat bears down without mercy. Siddharth S’s cinematography captures this sunburnt palette with quiet precision, turning the terrain into both adversary and testimony.

Oppression in Pechi isn’t framed as cathartic or operatic, even though the film could easily have leaned into that register. Instead, Selvamani takes a step further to show how oppression, when pushed to the margins of the margins, corners a person into responses born not of choice but of sheer necessity.  In Mariyappan’s world, the choice is not between peace and retaliation, but between erasure and the faintest grasp at selfhood. Even then, any response he can muster pales against the enormity of the forces ranged against him. The film recognises that in extreme cases of humiliation and exclusion, violence is less a narrative twist and more a grim inevitability.

There are melodramatic flourishes, but the film wears them lightly. The appearance of Mariyappan’s mother through disembodied voices, and memories that surface like sudden gusts is a particularly inventive touch, lending emotional depth without tipping into sentimentality. Rajmuthu’s performance is the film’s core. It is deeply affecting, as he carries the weight of Mariyappan’s grief, fear and resilience with a disarming honesty.

Pechi is not just the story of a man on a journey. It is the story of the forces that make such a journey necessary. Selvamani crafts an unvarnished portrait of a system that sustains itself on exclusion and exploitation. In its final echoes, the film leaves us with an unsettling truth. Time may move forward, but the structures of oppression evolve far more reluctantly.

It is little wonder that Pechi earned a Special Jury Mention at the 17th IDSFFK. This is a film that lingers, quietly demanding that we look again at the landscapes, literal and social, that we take for granted.