When sky is the limit

Sandalwood watch

Kannada movies are going beyond what meets the eye. Experimentation is the keyword now, not just in Hollywood or Bollywood, but even in Sandalwood where varied scripts and formats are being tried out. While action and glamour-based scripts always dominated the film industry, realistic scripts and real-life storytelling seem to be taking centrestage now.

Filmmakers and artistes in the industry feel that the past few years have seen a sea of changes in the way scripts are dealt with. Multi-starrer projects seem to be hogging the limelight. Actor Vijay Raghavendra, who finds the changes in the industry encouraging, says that with movies like ‘Godhi Banna Saadharna Mykattu’ and ‘Thithi’, stories are being told in a unique manner.

Being part of multi-starrer projects like ‘Chowka’, Vijay feels that producers and directors are ready to take up stories which have a lot of characters in them. “These movies are more fun to work in and the spotlight falls on many characters. Also, it’s not just one person who is carrying the responsibility of the project on their shoulders,” he says.

Movies are moving away from being only hero-oriented to focussing on heroine-oriented scripts too, he adds. Sandalwood movies are trying shorter formats and scripts shot without cuts as well, which give the audience a different cinematic experience. Sindhu Lokanath, who will be seen in ‘Samayada Gombe’ by Vikram Yoganand, says, “Directors have a platform to experiment with now. In this movie, the script shows real-life incidents that happen in a girl’s life during two hours of a particular day.”

The movie has been shot without any cuts and no angles have been experimented with. “There are no closeup or wide shots in the project. The camera just moves with the artiste which makes the story more realistic,” details Sindhu. Kannada movies, nowadays, are also being taken overseas a lot more compared to yesteryears and this is helping them arouse curiosity among the regional audience, she adds.

To invest in new subjects is a difficult and important decision and movies like ‘Rama Rama Re...’ work commercially with the present audience, feels actor-director Pannaga Bharana whose ‘Happy New Year’ deals with a different story pattern. “This shift has also helped other movies come into the highlight. I’ve always loved anthologies and ‘Happy New Year’ turned out to be just that, where five stories are showcased yet they are all unconnected,” he says.
Pannaga vouches that only with such experimentation will the industry revolutionise. “It’s not easy to have five stories and justify all characters in an anthology. As long as a story is able to keep the audience engaged and connect with them, any movie will click,” he says.

Realistic themes and trying out subjects that have not been worked on earlier are the ‘in thing’ now. P C Shekar, director of ‘Raaga’, says that with a broad-minded audience comes the responsibility of making good movies. “Initially, I also made more commercial movies, where the script would be twisted according to the star in it. But a director’s vision to explore is now being recognised,” he says.

“‘Raaga’ was one movie where I was able to represent emotions and the story of a visually-challenged, which was a bit unconventional,” he says. Shekar is also hopeful that these changes in the film industry are for the good. “It’s a cycle — an untold story will pull a crowd and when there is a crowd, more such movies will be made,” he says.