Adoor Gopalakrishnan, who has been making films outside India's mainstream commercial film industry since 1972, is widely regarded as the country's most distinguished contemporary filmmaker. Despite his fame in India (where he is often described as Satyajit Ray's worthy successor), his films remain virtually unknown to audiences and film scholars in the West, although he has been honored with complete retrospectives at prestigious venues such as the Lincoln Center, the Smithsonian, the Paris Cinematheque and the Munich Film Museum. His 11 full-length features (he has also made over forty documentaries and shorts) have won major awards including the FIPRESCI prize (six times), the British Film Institute award and the UNICEF prize at the Venice Film Festival. France has conferred on him the Legion d'honneur. And yet Gopalakrishnan remains one of the most neglected artists in world cinema. Even in his native country, where he has been fêted with virtually every major film award including the coveted Dada Saheb Phalke award and has received India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhusan, there has been no sustained effort to promote his work or even preserve his films.

The critical writing also remains sparse and mostly untranslated in his mother tongue, Malayalam, a language spoken by about thirty million people. Gopalakrishnan's four books on cinema have only recently been undertaken as a translation project. The critical canon in English consists of an uneven collection of essays published in 2006 and followed by a standard biography in 2010. The large number of reviews, write-ups and interviews that exist in the popular press tend to revolve for the most part around a fixed set of issues and concerns, the most prominent being that of Gopalakrishnan's status as a humanist. Critics tend to applaud his “broadly humanistic” compassion, his refusal to adopt an ideological position and his avoidance of “the wooly sentimentalism of nostalgia.”