Best known to festival directors the world over as one of India's all-time great cinematographers; Shaji Karun - sometimes signed simply 'Shaji', but once listed in a Cannes catalogue as Shaji N Karun - provided the late Indian director Aravindan with unforgettable images in the latter's cycle of mythological stories set in the State of Kerala. Shaji's camera hardly seemed present at times when Aravindan turned his warm, perceptive gaze on the nature, costumes, rituals, traditional dances and plays that characterise the glories of a national heritage in this southern-most corner of the subcontinent.

Since then, Shaji has come to direction by way of documentary shorts commissioned by the State of Kerala for general and foreign consumption - eg, Wild Life In Kerala (1979), Carnival Of Tourists (1980) and The Elephant Hunt (1981).

The breakthrough as director/cinematographer came with Piravi (Birth) (1988), acclaimed at home and abroad as one of the best Indian films of the decade. A simple story that creates a sustaining mood through close attention to detail, the focus is on an aged father in a village who has heard that his son, a student at the University of Trivandrum, may have been arrested by the police for instigating unrest against the authorities. When the father journeys to Trivandrum to enquire about the whereabouts of his son, he runs smack into a wall of bureaucracy and red tape - and, in the end, resigns himself to the worst.

The same theme - the plight of little people smothered by an increasingly bureaucratic world - was the subject of Swaham (1994), invited to compete at the 1994 Cannes festival, in which the heroine is the widowed mother of four children, struggling to feed her family on the paltry income of her coffee-shop.

For his latest feature, Vanaprastham (The Last Dance), Karun returns to the traditions of dance and theatre that, back in the 1930s, required rigorous training on the part of performers. The hero is a boy of 10 who embarks on a life-long apprenticeship to master the noble Kerala art form of Kathakali, a combination of dance, theatre, and pantomime. Ron Holloway