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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Ian McDonaldORCiD, Dr Geetha JayaramanORCiD
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Comrade VS: The Lasting Campaign is a feature-length observational documentary that constitutes a practice-based research enquiry into political embodiment, longevity, and revolutionary memory within contemporary electoral democracy. Shot during the fiercely contested 2016 Kerala Legislative Assembly Elections, the film follows V. S. Achuthanandan (VS), then 92 years old, serving as Leader of the Opposition and the last living link to Kerala’s revolutionary communist past.A veteran of the first democratically elected Communist government in the world, led by E. M. S. Namboothiripad, and later Chief Minister of Kerala, VS represents a rare continuity between mid-twentieth-century radical politics and twenty-first-century electoral spectacle. The film documents his campaign not through exposition or historical narration, but through sustained observational attention to everyday political labour: early-morning yoga, strategic discussions with close aides, public speeches, media interviews, intimate domestic visits, funerals, weddings, and moments of performative symbolism, including a fleeting, magical gesture in which he releases a dove from a hat.Filmed with no commentary, interviews, or explanatory voiceover, the work advances an observational methodology rooted in long takes, temporal immersion, and participatory proximity. This approach foregrounds political practice as lived experience rather than ideological abstraction, allowing meaning to emerge through gesture, rhythm, repetition, and duration. The film thus contributes to debates within documentary studies around political representation, aging bodies, and the ethics of non-interventionist filmmaking.Following VS’s death on 21 July 2025 at the age of 101, the film has acquired an unanticipated historical resonance. The mass public procession that accompanied his body from Thiruvananthapuram to Alappuzha reframes the documentary retrospectively as both an archive of political persistence and a cinematic farewell. As such, Comrade VS: The Lasting Campaign operates simultaneously as documentary record, poetic chronicle, and practice-based research into the endurance of political commitment across time, generations, and embodied limits.
Author(s): McDonald I, Jayaraman G
Publication type: Digital or Visual Media
Publication status: Published
Year: 2025
Publisher: AkamPuram
Place Published: India
