Saturday 26th July 2014
CHENNAI: After three quiet months, more trouble has cropped up for the makers of Vijay’s next film Kaththi with A R Murugadoss.
Initially, when the film was announced in March, pro-Eelam outfits had objected to Murugadoss and Vijay doing a film with a production company called Lyca Productions - after word got out that it was supposedly owned by Mahinda Rajapakse’s aide Subaskaran Allirajah.
Protests against cinema relating to Eelam and Sri Lankans have been an extremely touchy subject in Kollywood. Most recently, a Sinhala filmmaker’s film With You Without You was not allowed to be screened despite playing one show in all.
John Abraham’s Madras Cafe, set in Lanka, was banned in Tamil Nadu and Santosh Sivan’s Inam was pulled out from theatres after pro-Tamil groups began protesting against ‘pro-Sinhala’ slants in the tale.
Again, on Friday, a group of over twenty youngsters belonging to the Students Progressive Front went to the South Indian Film Chamber and made an official complaint - calling for a ban on Kaththi and any other films made under the Lyca Films banner.
“After our brothers were killed in the ethnic war, nothing that is against Sri Lankan Tamils should be allowed inside Tamil Nadu as it hurts and offends our sentiments. We have heard that Lyca is planning to release five more films and so we are here to stop it immediately,” said Gowtham S, one of the people who signed the complaint.
Earlier, co-producers Ayngaran International had clarified that Lyca Productions had no direct link to the Lankan president and had no intention of hurting the sentiments of Tamil people.
Sources said that neither Vijay nor Murugadoss were rattled by the objections and are well on their way to completing the film on time, to release it for Diwali.
