Director Avinash Prakash on IFFR selection ‘Naangal,’ making an autobiographical, and coming to terms with a traumatic childhood 

Tamil filmmaker Avinash Prakash shares the journey of turning some of his most unforgettable childhood days into a film which is now headed to the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2024, and what the journey taught him

The generation that grew up in the 90s is quite a unique cluster. At the cusp of globalisation and the boom of the IT era, the wheels of progress never moved as fast as they did back then, and a wave of nostalgia hits you harder if you’re a fan of the pop culture from that era. That’s probably why speaking with director Avinash Prakash felt like a trip down memory lane. In Naangal, an autobiographical, Avinash shares the story of three brothers’ traumatic yet transformative and memorable upbringing in a dysfunctional family that might sound both eerily relatable to some, and poignantly nostalgic to many.

The trailer of Naangal features one of the siblings getting slapped by his authoritarian father for watching Padayappa too many times in theatres. But Avinash says that this particular scenario did not happen to him, “The attributes given to the three brothers are mine. For them, it doesn’t make logical sense to have those memories now, but back then, all of us were into films at that age. It was because our father was against the idea of television as it might hinder our studies’ instead, he was happy to take us to as many films as we wanted during the weekends. Even when poverty hit us and dad’s business was at a loss, we would get the lowest price ticket and after intermission, we would go and sit in better seats.”

It was during the pandemic that the ad filmmaker found solace in the comic books he got at a book fair. “Reading them took me back to the days at an estate where my brothers and I would take turns to play characters from the comics we read. As we studied in a village school, I was one of the very few who got to see most of the released films which I would narrate to my schoolmates. That’s when I noticed the storyteller in me. The pandemic gave me the space to rewind to those days when money wasn’t a priority and it was strange to notice how the difficult part of my childhood was also when life was good. I penned it down as a screenplay because I had else nothing to do,” says Avinash who clearly remembers Sara’s lending library where they borrowed books, and the small shop that sold chocolates they couldn’t afford.

“It became a lookback into why am I the way I am, and I realised how it was different from the dark films I had previously written and had been witnessing as well. It again took me to how magical it felt when I first watched the Harry Potter films and I wondered why we aren’t making similar ones. I also wrote a couple more scripts including a love story by the end of the final lockdown,” says Avinash who also went back to the script of Naangal to fine-tune it. “I found it to be refreshing as it did not have an agenda. I narrated this to a producer who said he wanted to be a part of this world. I finished the screenplay in 15 days and started to find the right actors for it.”

Avinash was clear that he wanted the child actors to be from Ooty. “I wanted to tap into how they weren’t over-exposed to media and wouldn’t ape another hero. The town also still has its innocence intact,” says Avinash who found the father character in Abdul Rafe. “He’s a dentist who I met a decade ago when he was interested in acting. He had a particular style that irritated me; then I realised he was very similar to my father! When I asked if he was interested in joining us, he had given up on acting. But then I convinced him and he came for an audition. The moment he gave his first shot, I knew he was the one. All my friends who have met my father and my brothers were astonished by how he looked and behaved... just like my dad.”

Surprisingly, Avinash says this trip down memory lane was not daunting. “I have always been open about what had happened. I don’t obviously want to go back to the days of poverty but as I grew older, I came to terms with what happened and realised it’s not wrong that it happened. During this process, I started empathising with my father a lot; something that had never happened earlier.

He points out an incident during the shoot: “Director Vignesh Raja (Por Thozhil), who has also acted in the film, was on the sets one day and I was explaining a scene to him in pitch darkness. I suddenly broke down in tears and that’s when I realised it’s a story of three children and a man who never gave up.” The director adds that a lot of improvisation happened on the sets, but it did not dilute the essence of the film. “That’s when I tried to put myself into my parents’ shoes and understand their situations. I realised that had I been in my father’s place, I would have been a much more bitter, violent person than he ever was. I made this film because I had to understand what life has taught me till now.”