Actress and television anchor Soumya is known for going off the beaten track. Last year she made a documentary on the legendary Chembai Vaidyanatha Bhagavathar. This time she is in the news for a short film series, Ashanum Ashathiyum .
Soumya and her friends bring on screen an aged couple and their love-hate relationship. Each episode is not more than three minutes’ duration. Playing the protagonists are Gopalakrishnan and his wife, Vijayalakshmy, founders of Sarang, an alternative school in Attappady. They reached Attappady as government school teachers and ended up protecting a dying watershed, thus giving a new lease of life to the forest and water sources along with setting up Sarang.
“Anuradha, their daughter-in-law, was my senior in college, and I used to go to Attappady to meet her. It was on one such visit that inspired us to think about a film. It was like giving back something in return for the love and affection we received there. My friends were so excited when I put forward the idea of a series of stories on them that we came up with nearly 40 stories. They live in this surrealistic village and share a beautiful chemistry that organically create a lot of witty situations,” says Soumya.
‘Kodalikanji’, the first story that was released on YouTube, is about how the husband tricks the wife into preparing food by coming up with a clever story of ‘Kodalikanji’, a special dish supposedly consumed by the royalty in Bhutan, which tastes like chicken!
In the forthcoming stories, we meet their neighbours Pankan and Janu, postman Suku and a few other characters. “We made 35 such films after one year of hard work. Although I tried for time slots in various channels, none was interested in telecasting them. An online portal has now agreed to screen 30 of the episodes soon. The rest will be released on YouTube. The crew comprises 20 of us friends and students of Sarang who were involved in various aspects of filmmaking. The initiative is meant to help students of the school with books and other study material,” says Soumya.
The series was shot at Olappamanna Mana, Palakkad. The team plans to release new stories of the series every Sunday on YouTube.
