Selvamani Selvaraj On His Hunt For Veerappan

'Veerappan's Story Is One That Teaches Us To Be Better As A Society'

Selvamani Selvaraj, director of the critically acclaimed Netflix documentary, The Hunt For Veerappan, speaks with Subha J Rao about its making.

THE early 2000s. A Chennai school. Two things fascinated the children — director Naga’s Vidaadha Karuppu, a television series about superstitions and the supernatural, and brigand Veerappan, who was still in the news for his exploits in the forests of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. He’d killed more than a thousand elephants for their tusks, and numerous officials who tried to nab him.

Selvamani Selvaraj was in Class 9 or 10 in DAV Mogappair, Chennai. It was an impressionable age. A year earlier, he’d heard of the kidnapping of Kannada superstar Rajkumar. These things registered but they were far away, geographically. His only exposure to the hinterland was the yearly summer vacations in his hometown of Thiruvannamalai, a land that charmed him. And then, during a family trip from Chennai, their vehicle was stopped near Sathyamangalam, and they were told to take a two-hour detour, because Veerappan and his associates were supposed to be in the jungles nearby. Suddenly, Veerappan was not a distant figure.

“I remember asking many questions as to why we were told to take a longer route. I did not understand why the elders were afraid. I just kept going back to a routine headline those days — that if Veerappan was not allowed to surrender, he would kill those in his custody. At that age, I saw it as a desperate move by someone who wanted to get back into society,” says Selvamani.

That same boy, after an engineering degree in BITS Pilani and an award-winning movie Nila (now on Netflix), would, in his 30s, go on to direct the critically acclaimed documentary The Hunt for Veerappan, streaming on Netflix. The documentary examines the beginning of the Veerappan saga, his reign of terror, and death in 2004, speaking to all stakeholders — villagers, his wife Muthulakshmi, forest and police officials. It stays non-judgmental, allowing space for different perspectives.

The 34-year-old filmmaker has moved on to his next project, Kanta, starring Dulquer Salmaan, and in a conversation spanning an hour-and-a-half, Selvamani spoke with OTTplay about his introduction to documentaries, the importance he attaches to establishing a bond of trust with his subjects, being neutral as far as possible, and how his goal is to add to the perspective about a topic or issue.

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Bollywood's Crass Cross-Dressing Formula

Hindi cinema is notoriously untrained in the art of empathy. Nowhere is this clearer than in the manner it treats the life-altering journeys between gender brackets. Manik Sharma writes.

AN abiding memory of ‘90s cinema, that highlights just how far or how near actors were willing to travel to break into the mould of the mainstream, is of Govinda, dressed in a hot pink sari singing, “Pehani kamariya pe sari, ke aayi ab aunty ki bari.” A couple of decades later, Ayushmann Khurrana — an actor who takes himself more seriously — cross dresses his way to a handful of punchlines and jokes in Dream Girl 2. Decades apart but tied by the same old syntax, Khurrana’s film invokes humour in an infuriatingly familiar tone. The joke is at the expense of the woman (Pooja) that Khurrana’s Karam temporarily becomes, as opposed to the cocksure man he otherwise struts around as. Ironically, even in the hands of a supposedly woke actor, supposedly cognizant of social interpretations of his work, there is little to write or say about what this latest act of grabbing a low-hanging fruit adds to our understanding of gender. In fact, it might have done the opposite.

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'Gandhi & Ahimsa Cannot Become Outdated'

Manish Saini on winning a second National Award, this time for Best Children’s Film, for his feature Gandhi & Co.

YOU can speak platitudes about Gandhi and slip up at the slightest excuse or, like the sweetmeat seller Bharat Bhai (an excellent Darshan Jariwala) of Gandhi & Co, nudge a little boy Mintoo (Reyaan Shah) to adopt the small things that make Gandhi big, and give him enough incentive to work towards that thought process. The 2021 Gujarati film by Manish Saini features young children playing gully cricket with rickety old men (even as an elderly lady plays third umpire), and speaks about the choices children make. And, how an affectionate elder can help them do the right thing. All this without being preachy.

This is the film for which Saini, who hails from Ateli Mandi in Haryana and now lives in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, has won a second National Award, this time for Best Children’s Film. His debut Dhh bagged the award for Best Gujarati Film in 2017. There’s one thing that links the films — both are set in the world of children, and possess an innocence that is endearing. — SJR

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The Expanse: A Telltale Series Rejuvenates Old Formula & Sets Marker For Future

The Expanse: ATS’ best accomplishment is to provide a way to interact with a universe with which one might already be familiar. Karan Pradhan parses its implications for the future of streaming entertainment.

THE television show The Expanse (based on the series of novels by James SA Corey) has been around since 2015 and completed six seasons back in 2022. Depicting a world a couple hundred years in the future where Earth and the military industrial complex of Mars are on a warpath, the series is available on Prime Video.

As of 24 August, three episodes (out of five) of The Expanse: A Telltale Series (The Expanse:ATS) had dropped on PlayStation, Xbox and PC, and brought some interesting implications for entertainment in the near future. Before we get into all that, however, it’s worth briefly revisiting what Telltale, in its original avatar, did for narrative adventures and storytelling.

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