Burglars reach the film director's house and then provide a cinematic plot twist
When the thieves entered the mansion of a famous film director in South India and took away gold, silver and cash, they made off safely. But days later, a small plastic bag, sewn shut with thin sticks and containing something wrapped in a white handkerchief, appeared outside the gate of the house.
It contained a medal for a prestigious national award that director M. Manikandan had won in 2021 for one of his films.
There was a short note, handwritten in Tamil, a regional language.
“Sir, please forgive us,” the note read. “Your hard work is yours alone.”
The Break-in and Partial Return, with its small-town intrigue and magnanimous absurdity, could have played a role in the kind of films Mr. Manikandan and other filmmakers make in southern India.
While Bollywood receives a lot of attention and recognition outside the country, some of India's most endearing and creative films come from its various regional cinemas, in languages such as Tamil and Malayalam.
Mr. Manikandan made his breakthrough with a film about two egg-stealing, slum-dwelling brothers with one goal: to do whatever it took to taste pizza. The film for which he won the stolen medal, 'Kadaisi Vivasayi' or 'The Last Farmer', was a comment on the difficulties of agriculture in India. But the surreal twists also exposed the absurdities of the national bureaucracy.
When an elderly farmer refuses to give up his plot of land, he is falsely accused of a crime. The courts recognize his innocence, but he must remain behind bars for weeks before the bureaucratic process can take its course. Therefore, a police officer is tasked with taking care of his little plot.
“What am I going to do with the money?” the farmer says in the movie, rejecting any idea of giving up farming or selling his land. “Do I use it as a pillow when I sleep?”
The thieves who came to take Mr. Manikandan's mansion clearly had ideas about what to do with money. But also a conscience, or perhaps respect for art.
Sathish Kumar, a senior police officer who is part of the intelligence team of the local police unit investigating, said the house in the town of Usilampatti was broken into through the front door last week. About $1,200 in local currency, 40 grams of gold chains and silver jewelry weighing a total of about one kilogram were taken.
It is a one-bedroom house with an office and a garden. Mr. Manikandan is there only occasionally and lives mainly in Chennai, the state capital, about 300 miles away.
“A pug guards the house while servants come in and out to feed him and clean the house,” Mr Kumar said.
Thefts are common in the city, although most have been solved with the help of CCTV footage, Mr Kumar said. But there were no clues in the burglary at Mr. Manikandan's home.
When the film director's manager found the plastic bag containing the medal on the east side of the building four days after the burglary, he immediately called the police, according to Mr. Kumar. Mr. Kumar and his team took the bag and medal into custody, hoping they finally had a lead on the perpetrators. But the fingerprints collected did not yield any matches.