Valiya Chirakulla Pakshikal 2015

A partly fictional account of the Kasaragod endosulfan disaster, told through the lens of the photographer Kunchacko Boban. The film charts nearly twenty-five years of pesticide use on government-owned cashew plantations and its chilling environmental and public health consequences. It follows how the chemical’s presence reshaped a landscape and the people who depend on it, revealing a story that unfolds slowly, in the days, weeks, and years after each spraying.

The narrative centers on the photographer’s fieldwork, beginning with his first visit during the rainy season of 2001, when a flood of color photographs captures the stark misery of numerous victims. These images, stark and haunting, helped draw international attention to endosulfan’s harm. As the film advances to the summer of 2006, it shows the human toll more clearly: several of the young people he’d photographed years earlier have died, underscoring the fragility of children and the long shadow cast by exposure. Yet the film makes clear that the harm did not end with those losses: children in the region continued to suffer from odd, debilitating diseases and ongoing health problems that defy simple explanations.

The broader context is woven through the policy lens as well: in 2011, at the Stockholm Summit of the UN on Persistent Organic Pollutants, a global call for a total ban on endosulfan emerged, a move opposed by India at the time. Returning to Kasaragod in 2012, the photographer finds the landscape altered but the human story far from resolved—the survivors persist in facing illness, stigma, and a difficult path toward healing, accountability, and environmental cleanup.

Throughout, the film balances intimate, empathetic portrayal with a broader critique of how a single chemical can reshape an entire region, leaving behind a lasting legacy for families, communities, and ecosystems. The camera’s patient eye captures both quiet resilience and the stubborn persistence of harm, inviting viewers to connect personal tragedy with macro-level environmental policy, and to question what responsibility looks like when science meets substance, policy, and memory.