When doctors are not busy prescribing cures for maladies that ail their patients, some of them like Dr Siju Jawahar find time to make movies. The doctor is giving wings to his passion of film making by directing a film Katha Paranja Katha starring Siddharth Menon, the ex-member of Thaikkudam Bridge and newcomer Tarushi in the lead.
As the name suggests, KPK is a film within a film. Both the lead actors have equal space. Siju says, “The film travels through the life of a female blogger and her blogs. The life of three different men impacts her life and the film is planned as a one-day travel film. There are social issues, gender issues, a journey, romance as well as thrilling moments.”
Right since his campus days, Siju has been involved in various cultural events like mono acts and plays, but kept his artistic aspirations aside to complete his MBBS. That done, he assisted a well-known serial director unofficially and managed to act in a few episodes of a tele-serial. Dr Siju further says, “All these happened in 1999 and then I went on to do my PG in Psychiatry. After that, I started doing albums and programmes for television.” He also managed to write a script for a film in the meantime, but only after a long wait is it seeing the light of the day in the form of Katha Paranja Katha.
Siju went through the same disappointments, anxieties and wait like any debut scriptwriter. He reveals, “My script would be in the hands of people who would say that they would take it further but then nothing would happen. A few times, even the shooting dates were fixed before it fizzled out. The producers would back out at the last moment.”
Time passed and Siju saw his script going nowhere. These dire straits prompted Siju to talk to his friends — Dr Rajesh, an ENT surgeon, and his architect, advocate and engineer friends. It was they who gave him the confidence to wing out on his own and financed his film. “They asked me to direct the film. Pre-production took three years and then began the wait for the nod of a well-known actor who liked the script, but the go-ahead delayed.”
When that wait too seemed to be never-ending, Siju and company zeroed in on the present cast. “Dileesh Pothen, Shaheen Siddique and Renji Panicker liked the story and came into the picture,” he adds.
Siju is not disheartened by his initial disappointments but mentions that the waiting was a blessing in disguise. “I could rework a few sequences,” he says.
Even while chasing his film making dreams, Siju did not stop practising and attended his doctoral duties. It was only during the shooting that he took four months off from his job. Incidentally, his wife has written the lyrics for four songs in the film.
