Director

Anushka Meenakshi

Duration: 66 mins
Language: Malayalam and English
Subtitles: English

My Name is Basheer

In October 2007, a group of people from PERCH, a Chennai based theatre collective, travelled to Kozhikkode, Kerala, to rediscover the world of the Malayalam writer Vaikom Muhammad Basheer. The people they met, and the sights, smells, tastes, and sounds of Kozhikkode were the source of inspiration for two plays in English based on several of Basheer’s stories. Many of Basheer’s stories reveal something of the writer himself – his incredible humanity, his experiences of love and poverty, his criticism of politics and war, his eclectic taste in music, his love of nature, and his radical beliefs about the society around him. ‘My Name is Basheer’ is a film that weaves scenes from the two plays with interviews of his family and others who knew him closely.