Youngsters in Kannada cinema are turning the industry on its head with sheer ingenuinty and talent.

Namma tarantino
Rakshit Shetty,32

There is one thing that the new crop of Kannada filmmakers have in common, it is their ability to multitask. In Ulidavaru Kandante, Rakshit Shetty, was seen playing a central role in addition to being the director, scriptwriter and lyricist of the film.

"I came as an actor to the industry but thought that nobody would cast me, so I started writing and directing," says Shetty who debuted as a lead in Simple Agi Ondh Love Story (2013), after a 20-month-long career in the IT industry. With no godfathers in the industry or formal training in filmmaking, all his learning came from watching films.

"I would see a lot of films by legends like Quentin Tarantino, watch interviews where they talk about how they did a particular shot and go back to watching the scene. I got a few small roles in films then and took them up only to learn the craft by hanging around the sets," he says.

After Simple Agi Ondh Love Story, Shetty quit his job and it was on this five-month long break that he began writing the script of Ulidavaru Kandante, a film set in coastal Malpe with five parallel stories that connect to a single murder. "I wrote five characters so I could play one of them and cast bigger stars in the others. So, when the audience came to watch them, they would watch me too," he says.

Being a fan of Tarantino and Kurosawa, Shetty had Pulp Fictionin mind when writing Ulidavaru Kandante. The film was divided into chapters (Tarantino style) and set in the year 1991, a year before Pulp Fiction. Ulidavaru Kandante didn't fare too well at the box office but won Shetty a host of awards including Best Director at the Filmfare Awards South. It also established him firmly as a talent to reckon with in the industry.

"Ulidavaru Kandante would have done much better today. It is films like that and Luciathat have set the stage for others like Rangi Taranga and Godhi Banna Sadharna Mykattu. It is like opening a pizza place in a village; people don't like the taste at first but it grows on them," he explains.

Following this, Shetty established a production house named Paramvah Studios, and Kirik Party, a film scripted by and starring him is currently in production under this banner. His flair for multitasking however ensures he is developing and scripting another film at the same time. With a working title of Thugs of Malgudi, the film featuring actor Sudeep will bring out a historical perspective of thugs that pre-dates the British era.

Breaking free
Suman Kittur,34
Hers is the typical story of the 'village girl goes to tinsel town', until it isn't. Women in her village called Kittur near Mysore were married at the first signs of puberty. So when the dreaded day arrived, Suman Kittur decided to hide it from her parents.

She managed to do it for two whole years, till she reached the 12th standard. Marriage, she knew, would be the end of her future and dreams. She threatened suicide when her parents insisted on it and expressed her desire to come to Bangalore. Her father, a farmer had a deep interest in cinema and ran a tent theatre in the village.

He later gave it up to work full-time in a theatre in Mysore. Kittur went along and was often given small jobs to keep her busy. This was the beginning of her learning and she understood the workings of the black box while watching every film a few hundred times. In Bangalore, at first, she began her career as a Kannada cinema reporter in a local newspaper. Two years later, she first crossed paths with gangster-turned-writer Agni Sreedhar, also a friend of her father. Shortly after he met Sreedhar, her father passed away.

"I decided to stay back and he taught me everything-from literature to philosophy and cinema," she says. It was during these conversations that Kittur began thinking about the portrayal of the underworld in cinema. This was the beginning of the classic Aa Dinagalu which she initiated but decided to let KM Chaitanya direct it. She however wrote the title track for the film which became a hit.

Her first directorial venture, Kallara Sandhe (2008) was a satire co-written with Agni Sreedhar. Though she had taken her first steps in the industry, it was through the 2012 film Edegarike that she firmly established herself as a woman director in an otherwise male dominated industry. Based on Sreedhar's own life, Edegarike went on to be a cult classic and earned her praise from far and wide. "Even after so many years, I met a cab driver recently who claimed to have watched the film 10 times," she says.

Jazzy beginnings
Charan Raj,30

If your recent favourite Kannada track comes with jazz undertones and a brand new sound, you are perhaps already familiar with the magic of the industry's newest music director, Charan Raj. His tracks for Hemanth Rao's Godhi Banna Sadharna Mykattu (GBSM)have earned him praise from listeners and industry insiders alike. An engineering graduate, Raj began training in Carnatic classical music at the age of six and went on to learn Western classical in college. He says he got his Jazz training primarily from listening to greats like Louis Armstrong and Nina Simone.

"I had no access to studios. So, I began by assisting people," he explains. Before turning music director, Raj dabbled as a singer and music arranger. He was part of the popular indie band Thaalam and also sang for Ricky Kej's Grammy-award winning album Samsara. He debuted in the film industry in 2014 with Harivu. He met Hemanth Rao in 2013, while working on a film titled Love Churmuri. "The film wasn't complete, but he said that we will do something together.

We have similar taste in music and wanted to experiment with genres," says Raj. For somebody exploring the complex rhythms of jazz, Hindustani classical and ghazal at the same time, Raj has a fairly simple formula. "The sound should be catchy and easy. It doesn't matter if it is conventional or not. It should transport them into a new world," he says.

Currently working on three film projects-Soori's Tagaru, S Ravindranath's Pushpak Vimana and Rakshit Shetty's Ruari, he believes "it's a great time for new ideas. The audience is evolving and exposed to a lot of international movies. After GBSM, people are coming to me for music that is different," he says.

"Lucia was the start and Ulidavaru Kandante with Ajaneesh Loknath's music changed the scene drastically. The film actually had a soundtrack that gelled with its theme and not five separate disconnected songs," he adds. In addition to breaking convention with its unique sound, GBSM also decided to not take the music label route. "We wanted to keep all the copyrights with ourselves and released the music on the film website with an option to make a contribution towards its production," Raj says.

Game changer
Pawan Kumar,32

Actor, writer and director, Pawan Kumar's journey in cinema is in some sense a map of the much talked about 'new wave' of the Kannada film industry. Several others attribute the beginning of it (this new wave) to his 2013 science fiction film Lucia. But his foray into films began much earlier with the 2011 rom-com Lifeu Ishtene. Earlier, Kumar spent several years directing and acting in theatre productions.

Dwindling finances and the need to reach out to a larger audience led him to experiment with films. "I got cast as an actor in a few films, and that is how I met industry veteran Yogaraj Bhat, who read some of the stuff I had written and liked it," says Kumar.

Although his box-office friendly film Lifeu Ishtene garnered him a decent following, Kumar was unable to find producers for his next venture Lucia. Exasperated, he took to blogging about his experience.

His post vent viral and saw many readers offering support. Crowdfunding had not yet taken off in the country in a big way and Kumar admits he didn't know what it was called. Lucia thus became the first Kannada film to be produced entirely through a crowdfunding campaign.

However, it was only one of the film's many firsts. Lucia was the first to see a nationwide release and subtitles in every theatre. "We wanted to open up our market and not lose any audience for the lack of understanding the language," he says.

Following Lucia and its success, Kumar went onto establish Pawan Kumar Studios (PKS) that has as many as 65 shareholders and includes people from various backgrounds--from a 22-year-old IT professional to seasoned businessmen. This helped him produce another ambitious project, the thriller U Turn that opened worldwide in theatres this year and crossed the 10 crore mark. It is now set for a Netflix release-another first for a Kannada film.

"The idea is more of shared risk than shared profits. Filmmaking is a very risky business and producers can't be blamed for going by box office records," he says.

Award frenzy
Raam Reddy, 26
"I am anartist more than a filmmaker," says Raam Reddy, whose film Thithi recently won two Golden Leopards at the prestigious Locarno Film Festival and a National Award among many others. An economics student-turned-filmmaker, Reddy's debut film Thithi is a comedy set in a village in Mandya district that tells the story of three generations of men after the death of the patriarch at the ripe age of 101.

The feature film, shot with non-actors, was scripted by Reddy's childhood friend, Ere Gowda. "I knew I had a career in the creative field as I had begun writing poetry and had a keen interest in photography and music. Filmmaking was something that combined the three. But it was only on a visit to Ere Gowda's village that I knew I had to set my first feature there," he says.

"We had the best insider-outsider combination required for a film and I always knew I wanted to work with non-actors," he adds. A staple diet of world cinema, technical education from film school in Prague and a few short films later, Reddy was equipped to begin his ambitious project. Produced by Prspctvs Productions (his own company) and Sunmin Park of Maxmedia, Reddy knew early on that the film had commercial potential. "Heavyweights like Puneet Rajkumar and Rockline Venkatesh had watched it and told me it was a commercial film.

But I was looking to make a global film. In fact, when we entered Cannes Film Festival, there was no Kannada language option before Thithi," he explains. In the midst of finalising a global distribution deal, he admits that the film is rooted in the village and has run to full houses in single screens across the state. "When screened at the village, people laughed through introspection or nostalgia. It took them back to their roots.

While for the others, it is a new kind of escapism that has broadened the reach of popular culture," he says. "In fact one of the greatest compliments with regard to the realism in the film I received was through a review on BookMyShow, where somebody rated it at half a star and said he feels cheated because it was like a 'documentary shot with a handycam'", he adds laughing.

Global icon
Anup Bhandari,34

As an ad filmmaker's son, Anup Bhandari grew up making pretend films with his brother Nirup. "Most of them would involve me torturing him. That is the kind of cinema we were used to," he says. Early on, he scripted a film with a mish-mash of Bollywood elements that he hoped to feature actor Sudeep in. It was many years, an engineering degree, a short film and a stint in the USA later that Rangi Taranga happened. And since then, there has been no looking back for Bhandari.

A year's run in local theatres, a 72-theatre release in the USA, eight IIFA awards and its name on the Oscar nomination eligibility list, are only some of the many accolades the film has received. From a self-confessed industry virgin, Bhandari has become somewhat of a sensation.

He writes, directs, pens lyrics, produces and even sings some of his songs. It was, in fact, his humming a few songs that bagged him a producer for RangiTaranga. "I narrated one scene and hummed a couple of songs over Skype and before I knew it, producer HK Prakash was on board," he says.

A thriller set in the fictional village of Kamarottu, the film featured no big industry names except Sai Kumar, whose character, Bhandari admits, couldn't be publicised due to the suspense factor. "The technical aspects were like that in world cinema, while everything else was like in commercial cinema," explains Bhandari.

The film collected a whopping 1.3 crore in the first weekend of its release in the USA and was the first in opening the industry up to a large Kannada diaspora audience. Bhandari, who is currently working on his next big release, Rajaratha, believes that the time is right for sensible commercial cinema that doesn't make fun of the audience.