Life begins in the now!

Kannada cinema has been witnessing a number of content-driven films of late, which are a far cry from mass entertainers. These movies not only have exceptional scripts, but have also managed to win awards and even perform well at the box-office.

Puta Tirugisi Nodi is one of those critically-acclaimed films, which also bagged the special jury award at the Bangalore International Film Festival. Although, it didn’t have a long run in cinema halls, the movie has managed to wow audiences that managed to catch it. The film’s director Suneel Raghavendra gets talking to us about his movie, the idea behind it and more…

“It’s a film about looking forward to new things in life as opposed to being hung up on success or failure. It’s about a Bangaluru guy who is a former first-class cricketer.

The consequences of being a cricketer are that the prospects that you have in India are crazy, considering you can play for the Indian team or you could play for the IPL and become really rich. But the protagonist is forced to retire at a very young age because of an injury. So now, he decides to get on with life and become a Kannada teacher.

The film becomes an examination of what it means to be successful because success is a very ambiguous term. The modern middle-class Indian euphemism for that is ‘being settled’. So the movie focuses on moving on in life and also examines what success means to an average Joe,” says Suneel.

His inspiration for the film was bunch of kids that he saw at the Vidyapeetha Mata. “There was a Vedantha Gurukul there, with a group of Madhwa Brahmin kids studying Sanskrit. But in the evening, these kids with shaved heads and juttus wore printed T-shirts and played cricket barefoot. They were also abusing each other.”

This amusing composite image which had a temple in the background with kids that looked like miniature priests playing cricket, laid the foundation for Suneel’s story. His own struggle with academics and the pressure to perform hugely influenced his film too.

The makers are now planning to release the flick in Mysore, Mangalore and Hubli. Being the passionate filmmaker that he is, Suneel doesn’t feel that Kannada cinema is seeing a ‘new wave’ of cinema yet.

“Wave is a premature comment because waves are something that happen typically over a period of months or years.  The problem with the Kannada industry has been that we lost out an entire batch of artistic people to engineering and medicine because of this obsession to settle in life.

But now, a lot of them are coming back to basics and doing what they intended to do,” says the filmmaker, who’s thrilled to have seen films like Thithi, Godhi Banna and UTurn make a mark critically, and at the BO.