Last Day of Summer - George Kora

Last Day of Summer 

Direction: George Kora

Competed at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival Kerala (IDSFFK) 2017

Short Fiction Category | 21 min | Malayalam

Last Day of Summer is the portrait of an aging doctor and his son over roughly the course of a day, when the son returns home on his mother’s death anniversary. Ceremonies are performed and memories are shared as it explores their strained relationship and how they struggle to fill the awkward pauses, discover new family notes and rediscover old ones.

What to take back?

Almost everything! The film had beautiful character development, of both son and father, so much so that we developed a strong attachment for them. What's the most striking is how the whole essence of the character isn't given away all at once. We stereotype the father and son when we are first introduced to them, we judge them, but the course of the film reveals that our judgments couldn't be further away from the truth!

The father seems weird. Why is he pushing himself to learn Hindi?

Oh, does the son have a girlfriend he is hiding?

Is the father a bad doctor?

Did mother leave them?

Oh, no, she passed away.

He actually is best kind of doctor: the selfless one.

Oh, he is married. He's expecting a child.

Father was learning Hindi in order to be able to communicate with his daughter-in-law.

The nuances of family life, and the father son relationship, was especially touching. Not to mention it's Father's Day the day after tomorrow (18th June).

What could have been different?

Both actors did well, but the son's performance was powerful. The father perhaps didn't keep up. He was relatively less expressive. Perhaps a little more attention and encouragement to Achan's acting could have upped the level of the film.

The scene where the son pretends to want to pee precisely when his wife calls, just so that dad would/could speak to her, is the most powerful and touching, in the entire film. It was the moment that revealed everything: why dad struggled with Hindi, whose calls the son kept attending to, all the pieces fell into place. It would have made itself the perfect ending.

The actual ending, however, was not as powerful, and seemed a little more cliché. Yes it was a good full stop, to introduce the 'few years later' scene. However, nobody said that great stories need to always end in full stops.

It needs a bit of courage to come out of the comfort zone of strongly conclusive endings. It does seem a tough choice: the impactful !? of the phone call and the decisive pull of curtains of the . at the end of the show.

Overall one cannot deny that the film was so beautifully made.

Easily the best one we watched today.