The cover of ‘Nidhi - Kathegala Kudike’.
A city-based film group has released a book to raise funds to produce a movie. ‘Nidhi - Kathegala Kudike’, a Kannada book written by Kowshik Rathna, is a collection of five stories. While shooting a documentary film he travelled to multiple Karnataka villages whose elders would tell him folk tales. The book brings together these stories. The conversations between people in the stories are in different dialects of Kannada. It was released in October. So far, the group has sold 10,000 books. They aim to reach one lakh people.
The team of 40 is made up of people from various theatre groups like Drushya, Rangatanda, Ninasam, and Natana. Having worked in different areas of film production, the group now intends to make a movie independently. It will be called ‘Illegal’, and follow the story of seven middle class boys. It will be directed by Rathna.
The group settled on the idea after being rejected by multiple producers. “We thought of crowdfunding but since we are new, we weren’t sure how to ask people for such a big amount. So we decided to keep the price per person nominal and increase the number of people thereby parallelly building an audience for the movie. That’s when the idea of a book came to us,” Rathna tells Metrolife.
‘Nidhi - Kathegala Kudike’ published by Rathna Pusthaka, Rs 220. Available on totalkannada.com.