Going places with a featurette

Bengaluru-based filmmaker, Rajath Rajnikanth’s 36-minute film, Survivor, not only went under the radar of Cannes World Film Festival

Bengaluru boy Rajath Rajanikath always “nurtured a dream of becoming an actor. But destiny did not pave the way for him to tap into his talent. So the youngster, who was studying electrical engineering in SVIT, quit college midway and took up a professional course in acting at ‘Kreating Characters in Mumbai and a bachelors in filmmaking at St Joseph’s University, Bengaluru.

This was the prelude to the making of his featurette — Survivor — which won the Best film and best trailer awards at the Cannes World Film Festival 2023 along with 17 other global awards including three Best Actor awards which he received for playing the lead character and the film was the finalist At NYIFA New York Intn’l Film Awards too.

An elated Rajath shares the journey and the struggle behind the making and marketing of Survivor. “Soon after I came back to Bengaluru, a lockdown was announced. To keep myself busy and to explore my strengths, I made a six-minute short film Student of the Professor on the Netflix series Money Heist and posted it on my virtual platforms. Within days it got the highest views with the original cast of the series too commenting on my post. This motivated me to write something more and the story of Survivor evolved. Then my friends and myself got together and with no particular schedule we made the film with whatever money we had.”

The film took almost seven months to be made, he says and adds, that though the film is an action packed film, it was Rajath himself who choreographed the stunts as “we could not afford a stunt master. We would write out the fight sequences, turn up earlier than the shooting schedule and rehearse the moves on location before we rolled the camera,” he reveals. 

Survivor is set in a post-pandemic, where pharma companies start a ‘PROGRAM’ and eventually terminate the human subjects. While they are successful in killing most, one person survives. Instead of running away from them, he faces and fights them,” shares Rajath.

Survivor was originally made in the English language and “later dubbed into Hindi and Kannada. The film premiered in September this year on Jio and has found a spot on the IMDB page too,” beams the young filmmaker, who says the film took around six months to make, right from the scripting stage.

Rajath plays the lead in the film, which also features Aditya Madhavan, Shyam Eshwar, Laura Ferraz, Aditya Thonse, Nangkmen Dhar, Raajas Ravikumar, Hansika Sesh and Dyuti Das. Suraj Boddu is the cinematographer, while the film is produced by Justin Samuel and co-produced by Rajath under the banner AJ production.