The mainsteam Indian cinema conventioanlly represents India's farming communities as havens of rural bliss, peopled with comic peasants. The forest sets out to offer an alternative to this tradtional representation with its truer (and condierably more disturbing picture of an escalating feud between two villages in South India. Girish Karnad's first feature, made in the minority local language Kannada, it very much part of India's precarious but growing independent cinema; it bespeaks a determination to discuss topics that are central to the lives of millions of Indians rather than a desire to add to the torrent of escapist musicals, adventures and melodramas flowing out of the commerical studios. If Karnad's analysis of the situation in his film is hardly militant, it is nonetheless a brave attempt to face up to at least one aspect of the Indian reality.