At the Nandi awards announced recently, Minugurulu won seven prestigious awards. While the film did not do well commercially, it made an impression at many international film festivals, and has finally got its due back home. Ayodhya Kumar Krishnam Setty, the director, story writer and producer of the film, says “I had anticipated my film to get many awards including the best film title, but the jury awarded it the second best. However, I am thankful for the appreciation.”
The thoroughly researched story is based on the visually challenged, and has nearly 40 blind artistes in it. “I visited all the blind schools in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana to learn more about the visually challenged. How they behave, how they think, how do they imagine and a lot of other things, I worked on. I met doctors at eye institutes in Hyderabad even and visited a blind school in the US,” he says. After an extensive research, he wrote the script and narrated it to many, but no one was interested because of the subject’s backdrop. Finally, he decided to produce it on his own.
Born and brought up in Visakhapatnam, Ayodhya Kumar completed his post-graduation in Marine Chemistry from Andhra University. “I was interested in films since I was in Class X. After my education, I worked in the US as a software professional,” says the director.
After eight years of working, he joined a film direction course in North West Film Institute, Portland and worked in Hollywood as an assistant writer and even worked for a news channel. That’s when this story struck him. He decided to return to india to make the film in his mother tongue, Telugu.
After completing the film, he struggled to release it. “There were nearly 40 screenings for various people from within and outside the industry, but everyone felt the film may not work commercially. Finally, Dasari garu took up the project as he liked the film a lot,” says Ayodhya, who lost a few crores on the film, but is happy that it finally got recognised and won prestigious awards. He even sent the film to the Oscars in 2014 as an entry from the US. “I had registered the film in the US and also released it there with English subtitles. Then I sent the film to all the competitions and they accepted it. But it couldn’t reach the final nominations. But I am happy that for the first time, a Telugu film got selected in the competition level at the Oscars,” he says.
Ayodhya Kumar Krishnam Setty
With this appreciation, Ayodhya Kumar is now planning to release the film in Hindi and Tamil. “Some of the actors like Raghuvir Yadav, Ashish Vidhyarthi and Suhasini are popular in Hindi and Tamil too. So I am planning to dub and release it,” he says.
Post that, he is planning to make a romantic film with Siddharth as the lead. This will be the actor’s comeback in Telugu. Senior actress Jayasudha wants to work with Ayodhya. “She is a highly talented actress and it’s not easy to write characters for her. But I am planning a script suitable to her and then I will definitely approach her,” says Ayodhya.
