Caution: Spoilers ahead. The Tamil-language anthology film Paava Kadhaigal revolves around “honour, love, sin, and pride,” according to t...
Caution: Spoilers ahead.
The Tamil-language anthology film Paava Kadhaigal revolves around “honour, love, sin, and pride,” according to the official synopsis. Sudha Kongara’s Thangam is set in rural Tamil Nadu in the 1980s and follows transwoman Sathaar (Kalidas Jayaram), who sacrifices her love for Saravanan (Shantnu Bhagyaraj) .
In Vetri Maaran’s Oor Iravu, a man drags his daughter through a slow death for having married a lower-caste man. The film stars Prakash Raj as the father, Sai Pallavi as the daughter, and Hari as the husband. Kangara and Vetri Maaran spoke to Scroll.in about their respective creations and how these films tie in with their larger body of work.
Sudha Kongara on ‘Thangam’
“I came across the script [by Shan Karuppusamy] and began sobbing. I read it at four am before leaving to shoot Soorarai Pottru. There’s the part where Saravanan hugs Sathaar, asks him to stop chewing betel lips and gives him a lipstick and tells him use this to look like Hindi film heroines, who were a big deal in rural Tamil Nadu in the ’80s, them being fair and beautiful. In the end, Saravanan finds that lipstick neatly wrapped. That moved me.
Sathaar was based on a person my writer knew. He was a student in Coimbatore. Whenever he would return home, this transperson would hang around...
