With theatres s across the country still shut and not opening anytime soon even in the Unlock 1.0 phase, Indian filmmakers are choosing digital premieres for screening their movies. Recently, Amazon Prime announced a stellar line-up of films cutting across languages which were going for an OTT release on its platform. One amongst these films was the Tamil movie Ponmagal Vandhal, which started streaming on 29 May. The movie has been produced by Tamil actor Suriya, with his wife Jyothika starring in the lead.
Jyothika, in an interaction with The Daily Guardian, talks about the film and the preparation for her role as a lawyer in the movie. “The film is a crime thriller about a girl who’s finding out about a case over the last 13-14 years. We have underlined a social cause which is very important in the movie. It’s about child abduction and rape, which is a major issue going on in society today. We have an underlying storyline, a proper thriller. As for preparation, since I’m still not very fluent with my Tamil, I take my script two months in advance, there’s a lot of mugging of the dialogues to be done. The director did his part of the homework by visiting all the courtrooms. This is a court in Ooty, so it’s one of the olden-day courts from the British era so you still have a red-carpet feeling in the courtroom,” she says.
Jyothika is both anxious and excited about the film being released on an OTT platform. “See, this is the first time there’s a world premiere happening of a film, so we are waiting to see how much the digital medium can pull it up. But it looks extremely positive and I do feel this is a big blessing and boon for small-content films for sure. I mean the bigger films we’ll know later when they come out, but right now It seems this is the change,” she says.
Reminding how Tamil Nadu doesn’t have as many multiplexes as the other part of India does, Jyothika believes that the digital platform is a boon for content-based films. “This is certainly a big boon for films which are contentbased and women-oriented also.”
With Bollywood films like Gulabo Sitabo and Shakuntala Devi also releasing straight on OTT platforms, we’ll have to wait and watch if this is the new normal for film releases in India, or it’s an aberration caused by the lockdown.