PODCAST| Matt Micucci interviews Vasan Bala, director of the film The Man Who Feels No Pain.

To listen to the interview, click on the ► icon on the right, just above the picture

Director Vasan Bala presented his film, The Man Who Feels No Pain, in competition at the 3rd International Film Festival and Awards Macao. The film is at once a tribute to the martial arts movies that he loves – and he enthusiastically shares a short beginners’ guide to the genre in this interview – but also draws inspiration from his own past and memories. Its protagonist, as the title suggests, is a young man who feels no pain and who grows up on a diet of martial arts videos, eventually learning how to fight. The condition he has is a metaphor, Bala explains, for the views on pain within a patriarchal society. Here, he tells us about that but also about other interesting aspects of the film, such as the music and his actors, who really had to put in quite an admirable physical performance.

The Man Who Feels No Pain: A boy called Surya suffers from a rare disorder called Congenital Insensitivity to Pain. The condition is life-threatening but he escapes his condition with the help of his only friend Supri, his mischievous grandfather Ajoba and a host of martial-arts films on VHS. He is inspired to become a vigilante as a result of one tape in particular in which a one-legged man called Karate Mani fights off 100 combattants. When he is an adult, Surya returns to the neighborhood of his childhood and begins a strange series of adventures involving Supri, Mani and Mani’s evil twin brother Jimmy.