“Nabhamsi is the story of a man’s journey to identify the source of his primal memories,” says filmmaker Ram Alladi about the Sanskrit film he is set to direct. The film also incorporates dance and other art forms to aid storytelling.
“ Nabhamsi is a live-action lyrical romance. The story is set 1,000 years ago, hence we chose to tell our story in Sanskrit.” The movie has 18 songs with a few dance compositions incorporating karanas of Bharatanatyam.
Ram learnt Sanskrit in the past few months and has written the story that has sci-fi elements too. The script is in English and Sanskrit and he hopes to consult Sanskrit scholars to correct the syntax.
Ram recently bagged the best director award for his film Ra’s Metanoia , at the Dada Saheb Phalke Film Festival in April 2021.
Born in Hanamkonda in Telangana where his father was a Tahsildar in the revenue department, Ram went to a boarding school in Kazipet at the age of nine. As an ‘80s child, he spent his free time watching cartoons comedies, historicals (Bharath Ek Khoj ) and period drama (Tamas ) on television. Inspired by his favourite comedy, Yeh Jo Hain Zindagi , Ram wrote, directed and acted in a comedy play. Cinema was a passion that goaded him to become a filmmaker. . “I decided to experience a film from a filmmaker’s point of view.”
Inspired by history
A self-taught filmmaker who honed his skills by reading books and watching videos, New York-based Ram was a software professional who started a web designing enterprise in Hyderabad in the ’90s and then moved to the US in 2004.
Despite initial challenges, he stuck to his convictions. Buoyed by the response to his first documentary Chiselled (2017), he went on to make the period drama Ra’s Metanoia on Mahatma Gandhi a story he had written 30 years earlier. Ra’s Metanoia stems from Ram’s visit to the Gandhi museum in New Delhi in 1989 where Gandhi’s blood-stained shawl in a showcase caught his attention. “I kept thinking how I could wipe those stains out.” Ram decided to make a film blending the past and present in a bid to make Mahatma Gandhi relevant. . Shot entirely in New York and New Jersey, Ra’s Metanoia combines vintage film styling with computer-generated sets to depict Gandhi’s life in a 40-minute non-linear period drama with sci-fi elements.
Ram hopes to release Nabhamsi in 2023 and also work on a feature film based on a true event from the ‘70s and a political documentary from the ‘60s.
