Multi-Award Winning Tamil Director Vetrimaaran’s Shocking Compromise In His Stunning New Film

Everyone who has seen  the Tamil movie-making maestro Vetrimaaran stunning new short film Ooor Iravu which is part  of the  new Netflix anthology Paava Kadhaigal, would agree that  this half-hour masterpiece  on honour killing is  another feather in  the  director’s cap.

 What comes as a shock is that the final moments  of the storytelling are missing from the film. Veterimaaran  had to complete the story with graphic sketches  depicting  what the end  should have been like.

In a conversation with this writer Vetrimaaran  confessed  it was a  major compromise  that  he had to make  due to the Covid 19 lockdown.

 Says  Vetrimaan, “Otherwise it would have been a lot different. It was  a major compromise.And  I know, it jars. To smoothen it out I tried to use such images in the beginning of the short as well(to give the work a finished look).”

A  majority  of  Vetrimaan’s film  unfolds in the  darkened courtyard  of  a traditional  Hindu household where, in one of the rooms lies the  dying daughter(played by  Sai  Pallavi) of  the  patriarch(Prakash Raj) who has just poisoned  his own daughter  for  marrying outside their community.

Says  Vetrimaan, “This film  comes from the grief  about  our inability to change. If it makes some of the viewers introspect then we have succeeded. I wanted to show the multi-layered hierarchy of the family, village, country through the depth and width of that courtyard. We get to see all dimensions and people at all ages and all beliefs in that shot.”

Vetrimaan feels  our cinema  has a  long way to go.  “I always feel that we have better minds  than mine making films.But  none want to push themselves. All are happy with the place we are in.But I’ll really try to push myself hard to do films that are relevant.”

  The  director whose  films Aadukalam(2011)  and  Visaaranai(2016) have won multiple  National awards is  now working on  another hard-hitting socio-politically relevant  film.

Shedding some light on this new film Vetrimaaran says, “I’m doing a story on the slaying of a rebel leader.It was supposed to start shooting  earlier .But it got delayed due to heavy rains at the location.It is set  in the  late 1980s in Tamil Nadu and features mostly new and non-popular actors.”