Sandalwood now big on road films

Travel films seem to be dominating the Kannada film industry. While the script makes it a fun watch for movie buffs, the challenges and efforts behind each on-the-go project are aplenty, say filmmakers.

Sunil Bhimrao is all excited about his upcoming film ‘Onthara Bannagalu’, which is slated to release for an August 17. The film which has five leads revolves around travel.

“Travel can be very symbolic. In our film we are trying to depict the physical travel as well as the emotional ride that each of the characters are going through,” he says.

Sunil adds that when he first wrote a two-line script for the film in 2013, travel films were not a fad. “Back then travel had not been experimented with. Since 2017, a lot of journey films have been released. I am happy with this trend and it is encouraging to see film lovers accept new genres of films,” he says

He adds, “There is an understood success formula for films and to break that was interesting. People are increasingly turning to travel for a break from their routine and this genre is also a break from the set pattern.”

‘Onthara Bannagalu’ covers many scenic sights from Karnataka and aims to promote travel.

“Whenever you ask a person where they want to travel to, they immediately say Goa or Puducherry. We shot at locales like Bagalkotte, Sakleshpur, Bisile Ghat, Badami, Sagara, Talaguppe, Mangaluru and Udupi and want to tell our viewers that there is a lot to explore in Karnataka too,” adds Sunil.

The recently-released ‘Katheyondu Shuruvagide’ has a tale where the male leads are travelling on a Premier Padmini and they narrate their own respective flashbacks.

“I was inspired by The Motorcycle Diaries and Poornachandra Tejaswi’s novel ‘Nighooda Manushyaru’. Soon I knew that I wanted to write a travel script,” says director Kushal.

He states that writing for a travel film is interesting as it has different locales to show. “A travel story will include many beautiful locales and different characters which makes the film stand out. The screenplay will be quite engaging,” he says.

Travel-based films can be very exciting to work on, says director Anup Bhandari, whose ‘Rajaratha’ was a story based inside a bus. The film was shot in Mahabaleshwar, Bengaluru, Mysuru and Ooty.

“The movie required us to shoot at multiple locations which were quite challenging. The film had a background of monsoon and we had to place shoots at all locations accordingly. Coordinating around 20 to 30 actors in a bus was an interesting experience as in most of the shots everyone was in frame. We were also shooting for the film simultaneously in two languages too,” he says.

Maintaining the bus was a costly affair and the team bought a bus for the same. “We customised the bus according to the film, which helped us to get interesting shots,” he says.

It’s not directors who are impressed by travel films. Actor K S Sridhar, who acted and was involved in the pre-production work in ‘Life 360’ which released in 2017, says that a travel film can be a platform to explore a lot of emotions and challenging scripts.

“In ‘Life 360’, the story unfolds as it came and that is the best part of travel films. The journey is not just physical but also means to depict the journey of life. It was a lot of fun to shoot ‘Life 360’ as it was shot by a small crew during the weekends and the making process included short trips made by an intimate group in a car,” he adds.

Other Kannada travel films

Rama Rama Re

Raambo 2