The crow's egg/Kaakkaa Muttai

India 2014

Dir: M. Manikandan

109 mins

Cast: Vignesh, Master Ramesh, Aishwarya Rajesh, Joe Malloori

Rating: PG

M. Manikandan's debut feature Kaaka Muttai"(Crow's Egg) is not a children's film. It's a film for adults and centres around children oblivious to the growing social divide, capitalism and elitism. It's also a film you can take your children to without a doubt and be assured that they will enjoy.

... Manikandan also doubled up as the film's cinematographer and his work in this role is even more rewarding. G.V. Prakash Kumar's soundtrack is soothing and is easily his best work after last year's Saivam.

"Kaaka Muttai" is a little gem that's highly recommended and deserves to be celebrated. Tamil cinema should be proud of it and Dhanush and filmmaker Vetrimaaran should proudly raise their collars for co-producing it.

Zee New

After the none-more-lavish escapism of Prem Ratan Dhan Payo, the UK release of Tamil festival favourite The Crow’s Egg (Kaaka Muttai) returns us to reality with a bump. The debut of erstwhile wedding photographer M Manikandan plays out around the margins of Chennai – its dumps, slums and wastelands – among a cast of thugs, drunks, urchins and goats who have neither the time, nor really the joy in them, to make a song and dance of things. No fairytale, then – but this committed latter-day parable mines both laughter and tears from the struggles of India’s poorest to put food on the table.

... Wherever he places his camera, he registers people who really do seem to belong to this milieu: no slumming is tolerated, and young Ramesh and Vignesh in particular have a giggly, us-against-the-world bond you surely couldn’t direct into them. (Their eyes visibly widen upon witnessing the discarded crust one contemporary has enshrined in Tupperware, as though it were a holy relic.) Sandwiched between starrier Hindi releases, it’d be a shame if The Crow’s Egg slipped through the cracks: here’s a film that doesn’t merely observe India’s economic divide from the outside, but inhabits it absolutely.

Mike McCahill, The Guardian