A film for the youth

COLLEGE STORY: A still from the film Cricket, Girls and Beer.

Umesh Shirupalli has just finished with the post-production of his second film Cricket, Girls and Beer . He is extremely euphoric at the way the film has shaped out and says that he has three more scripts ready and is in the process of finalizing the third film.

For Cricket, Girls and Beer he has chosen a newcomer Naga Shourya, who according to him, is very good looking and touts him to be the find of the year. “He will be one of the top three artistes in Telugu cinema soon,” he says confidently.

Adarsh Balakrishna's career will open up with this movie as he hasn't been given much recognition in his previous films and Surya Tej who plays one of the leads, was recognised as Krishnudu's friend in

Vinayakudu and is currently doing a significant role in a Rajendra Prasad-Suhasini starrer. In this project he has a romantic angle which leads to a thrilling situation .

Umesh, an MBA graduate went abroad and after twenty years realised his dream of making his kind of films.

His first project was based on kids, Circus Circus which was released by Suresh Productions last year and got rave reviews. Cricket, Girls, and Beer is about three siblings, each one find their interest in the game, love and a happy life with friends and drink. This is actually based on his life. Umesh has two brothers and all of them resemble the characters in the movie .

The second half of the story is pure fiction; it is about how the family and the siblings react when one character is entangled in a problem.

The film begins amidst fun and frolic in a college campus and ends on a thrilling note. A 2 hour-20 minute drama has two songs sung each by Sonu Nigam and Shankar Mahadevan. When there are so many Telugu singers around, why did he choose Sonu and Shankar? Umesh says there isn't much to read in it, it's just that they were accessible. All the music directors are his friends who are from BITS, Pilani. They work in US in their companies and spend time in the evenings working on the music for this film. Is he taking newcomers for his next film as well? “Of course,” says Umesh. He is not running behind stars for the simple reason that his boys are going to be stars soon. He has an interesting banner name too - Saggitarius Films.

He signs off, “My wife and me share the same sun sign!”