Book on best Tamil films

G. Dhananjayan’s second book on Tamil cinema is ready

G. Dhananjayan

“I felt it was just okay... I don’t know what the hype was all about,” says Dhananjayan about Gone Girl, which he has just watched. The head of Disney-UTV Motion Pictures (South) says he watches at least one film a day, and that it took over two years to compile and write Pride of Tamil Cinema, his second book. The book lists 203 Tamil films, of which 156 have received either a national award or were featured in the Indian Panorama section at the International Film Festival of India.

“When my first book, The Best of Tamil Cinema, was launched, there were a lot of queries on how the films were shortlisted and why I had left certain films out. So, in this one, I decided to limit it to those films that have been recognised by the Indian government — either by awards or by being featured in the panorama section at the IFFI. Apart from serving as a database for nationally recognised films, the book will be a starting point to discover films we must be proud of. It will help you look beyond Wikipedia,” he says.

It was in the process of watching the long list of films and then meticulously writing about them that he discovered many interesting facts about Tamil movies.

“Only two films (

Malaikkallan and Kanchivaram ) have so far won the Best Film Award (Golden Lotus). This figure is shocking, considering Bengali cinema has won it 22 times and Malayalam 11 times. Similarly, there are 22 categories in non-feature films, where Tamil cinema has won 16 awards, which is not even 1 per category. So if I were to make a similar book on Bengali or Malayalam cinema, the book would be twice as thick.”

Discovering the lesser-known films was the real pleasure of the research, he says. “We talk about the current period as a renaissance of sorts in Tamil cinema, but we’ve had revolutionary films covering sensitive topics even decades ago. Talking about Gone Girl , we had a whodunit back in 1971 called Veguli Penn , a thrilling investigation about who made a woman pregnant, with a nail-biting twist in the end. Aadum Koothu was similar to Chandramukhi in many ways; while the latter was a blockbuster, no one seems to have watched the former. Watching Oorukku Nooru Per , Unnaipol Oruvan and Agraharathil Kazhuthai was a rewarding experience.”

If sourcing DVDs for some old films was tough, gathering trivia about others proved challenging. “There were several films where the producer had the lone remaining CD, and if that gets lost, the film is lost forever. In some cases, I had to speak to the last surviving cast member to understand what happened during the filming to get some interesting trivia. So it’s not just the high grosser or the films that ran for 200-300 days that can be called unforgettable,” he says.