After 10 years of dabbling with short film making, a feature that did not get released and a writing stint on an upcoming film produced by Rishab Shetty, engineer-turned-filmmaker Akarsh HP set out to make his next film, a dark comedy called Family Drama, the trailer of which has got Kannada film aficionados enthused. Set to release in theatres on July 26, the film has Rekha Kudligi, Sindhu Sreenivasa Murthy (Achaar & Co) and Abhay (Daredevil Mustafa) in main roles, and follows a dysfunctional family, in which each member is looking out for his/her selfish goals.

“We’d released a trailer sometime in April to give everyone an idea of what they can expect and the world we were creating. The plan was always to release two trailers. Since we are a new team, we thought that people would not blindly trust us with just the one. We wanted to give them more. The second trailer was more about the vibe of the film, the mood and quirkiness that’s coming up,” he explains. Luckily for the debutant filmmaker, the plan worked and people did take note.

When the trailers came out, film aficionados pointed out how the treatment is reminiscent of a Guy Ritchie project. Was that deliberate? A means to get the justified end? “There was no conscious effort to draw inspiration from any other filmmaker, but I must admit that I was inspired by Sriram Raghavan and the Coen brothers. For instance, there is a film called Burn After Reading, which became inspiration for the framing and treatment. Besides that, all that I wanted to do was to have fun,” says Akarsh.

Although the trailer has some splatters of blood, Akarsh maintains that his film is a film for all audiences. The idea, he says, was to exaggerate the small dysfunctionalities of each member of that family to the extent that people don’t connect to themselves but as someone they may have seen in their neighbourhood. That, he says, is where the humour comes, because every single character is morally corrupt. “In all dysfunctional families, there are moments of selfishness, which are suppressed because a family is seen as a single unit. But what if there are people who don’t see it like that?” asks Akarsh, adding that the film does not attempt to preach what a family stands for. “There is no subject matter at the core; it’s just a pure comedy. There are some 10 characters and each has a sub plot,” he adds.

Getting Family Drama on the road

Right now, there’s an audience that is keenly awaiting the release of the film, but not long ago, Akarsh was almost set to hang up his filmmaker boots, after repeated rejections in finding a producer for Family Drama. “About a year ago, I got to meet Abhay through a common friend. He was on the lookout for his next project after Daredevil Mustafa and wondered if I had any stories that would work for him. We discussed a few, but he wasn’t entirely invested, so I told him about a story I had since 2017, which didn’t excite many people back then. I narrated the log line and Abhay liked it, after which I began working on fleshing it out into a full-fledged script. It is at this stage that we were introduced to our producer, a US-based Indian, who was sold on our pitch deck and invested on the film without even meeting us in person. Abhay handled the executive producer portfolio, besides acting in the film,” explains Akarsh.

The film went on floors in January this year, with a July release the agenda from the very start. “Thankfully, we were able to stick to the timeline we’d envisioned,” he says. The cast, says Akarsh, was chosen either based on their body of works or that they’d collaborated with the filmmaker earlier. Rekha, for instance, was who Akarsh envisioned while writing the mother’s character, a woman who is cunning and crooked. Having worked as assistant on a film that Rekha was a part of, Akarsh was confident that she could pull it off with panache,” he says.

“Last year, when I didn’t think my film career was going anywhere, I began working on a documentary, wherein I would meet and speak to one-film-old filmmakers here to understand their process and if their struggles were similar to mine. That’s how I got to meet Sindhu, who’d just directed and acted in Achaar & Co. Months later, when I finished the script of Family Drama, there was a cameo role that I thought was apt for Sindhu and approached her. She liked the role, but wondered why I wasn’t offering her a main role. I thought that after Achaar & Co, she’d want to be a part of a major production and not an ensemble film like Family Drama,” adds the filmmaker.

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