Has Shekhar Kammula’s movie Fidaa mainstreamed the Telangana dialect in the two Telugu states? If the figures from turnstiles are an indication, it is a big yes. While the movie has collected ₹12.35 crore in the Nizam Territory (roughly the Telangana region) it has toted up ₹12.92 crore in the areas of Andhra Pradesh which is divided into eight segments by film distributors.
While Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao, and other political leaders from Telangana have given a big thumbs up for the movie, it is the reaction from ordinary viewers which has driven the movie into third week of houseful shows. In more ways than one, Fidaa shows the freckle-faced spunky heroine who is willing to fight, speak her mind and win in a Telangana village landscape away from swaying coconut groves.
Different level
“The language is one of the invisible characters of the movie. Earlier films had characters like villains or comedians speak the dialect. Now the protagonist speaks and is novelty at the same time and it has been used to create the ambiance of the place. I think it was Nagesh Kukunoor’s Hyderabad Blues that was the first to use the Telangana dialect and people loved it. Now, Shekhar Kammula has taken it to a different level,” says Mamidi Harikrishna, Director of Culture, Telangana State.
For Shekhar Kammula, who is seen as a craftsman of urbane social dramas that are a lapped up by the multiplex crowd, this was different territory.
“We expected the movie to do well in A centres and in Telangana region. Unexpectedly, it has surprised us by doing well even in B and C centres in Andhra as well as overseas. It is the human drama as well as the novelty of the language that has attracted the audiences,” says Dil Raju, producer of Fidaa .
General audience
The curiosity factor is not limited to academia and political circles. Recently when a senior journalist from Hyderabad visited Vijayawada, his driver sneaked off to watch Fidaa .
“The movie was showing in four cinema halls. Tickets were not available at three. He managed to get in one and he found that people loved the movie with some of the repeating the dialogues,” D. Amar told his friend about his driver and his curiosity about the response for the movie.
It is revelatory to recall that only a few decades earlier, a movie called Mondi Mogudu Penki Pellam (1980) had a scene where the husband asks his wife (who speaks the Telangana dialect) not to open her mouth. But she does and all hell breaks loose.
Now, Fidaa spells the change in the cultural air.
