70th National Film Awards: from working class jobs to being part of a National Award winning film

National Award-winning film Aattam explores crime, drama, and the grey areas of human nature within a theatre group.

Except for the element of crime that is central to the plot of Anand Ekarshi’s Aattam, the winner of the National Award for the Best Film of 2022, there is much in the film that is similar to the background of the people involved. The filmmaker and most of the actors have all been a part of the Lokadharmi theatre group for years.

Many of the actors who are playing characters with daily wage jobs like electrician, plumber or gas agency worker in the film actually do these jobs in their real lives. Most of them also retain their real names in the film.

“Except for Zarin Shihab and Kalabhavan Shajon, I have known them all at Lokadharma for close to two decades. During the COVID-19 pandemic days, actor Vinay Forrt suggested to me that we should make a film with all of them, as they all wished to be film actors. The thought for Aattam began from that point. I decided to set the film in a drama troupe, bring in an element of suspense drama and also explore the grey areas of a subject which has not been touched upon much,” says Ekarshi in an interview to The Hindu, soon after winning the National Award for his debut film. The film also won the Best Screenplay Award for Ekarshi and the Best Editing Award for Mahesh Bhuvanend.

In Aattam, a scandal which threatens the very existence of a theatre group explodes when Anjali (Zarin Shihab), the lone female member of the troupe, raises an allegation. With the identity of the culprit still in the dark, the chamber drama clinically explores the motivations of each character, as the equations between the group shifts constantly. Finding an answer to the who or why becomes immaterial after a point, a fact which the movie underlines in its well-conceived climax.

“I was aiming for a film which could push people to contemplate on things, while not being preachy or loud. At the same time, I wanted it to be an engaging drama. It helped that we had a producer like Ajith Joy, who was impressed by the 10 minute pilot shot and took the film all this way,” says Ekarshi.

Aattam had earlier won the Grand Jury Award at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles as well as the award for the best Malayalam film at the International Film Festival of Kerala. After it was released in an OTT platform, the film received much attention from outside Kerala too. The National Award is bound to take the film to a larger audience. Meanwhile, Ekarshi is working on his next film, which he says would be a love story.