It's all in the family for Ananya

Ananya Kasaravalli looks like she belongs. She walks around comfortably through Tagore Theatre in Thiruvananthapuram, sits among the film-loving crowds of the International Film Festival of Kerala. A year ago, she had come to Thiruvananthapuram with the short film Devil in the Black Stone and the documentary Beyond Binary. That was the IDSFFK, the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala. For the IFFK, she has brought her first feature film Harikatha Prasanga (Chronicles of Hari) on an artiste called Hari who plays female roles. But she’s been here a lot, as an AD to her filmmaker dad whom Kerala loves and adores — Girish Kasaravalli. She is assisting him to make a documentary on veteran filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan.

“I grew up watching Adoor sir’s films. I remember watching Elipathayam and being fascinated by its pace,” she says. As a teenager she had wanted to become an actor. Not that being her dad’s girl had made it any easy for her. She has been to auditions that rejected her, calling her a bad actor, asking her ‘what face is that’. But she made it eventually, acting in a few films including one of her dad’s. “It was a nerve-breaking experience working with him. I was also the AD and costume designer. But then it was a great learning. He is precise, he tells his actors exactly what he wants.”

She must have picked a little of that, she hopes. But she began watching her dad’s films seriously after going to the LV Prasad Academy to learn filmmaking. “Till then, he was just my father that a lot of people admired for his work.” She had by then got tired of acting, having worked in a lot of television serials and thousand-long episodes. “The idea that I try filmmaking came from my (late) mom Vaishali, also an actor and director. I had worked as an AD in one her films and she suggested I try it.” Ananya began with documentaries and short films, two of which were based on short stories. Now her feature too is based on a short story by Gopalakrishna Pai.

“I was telling him about my documentary Beyond Binary which was about transfeminity. And he told me about his story which was similar. His story is about a single person but it is based on multiple characters.” Her dad co-wrote the script with her and Pai but she ‘banished him from the sets’. “He was not happy with that but he liked the film once he saw it,” she says, laughing. Her next too would be of the art house kind, she hopes. “Any director can only make his/her kind of film. I suppose this is mine. My brother Apoorva on the other hand makes commercial cinema.”