Apart from its main purpose, what makes the project ‘Navarasa’ even more interesting?
The livelihood of many people across the Globe took a huge hit due to the current pandemic and those 5–6 months have been the toughest period in their carrier. Cinema, especially in India, was just seen as an entertainment medium and people often forget that there are lakhs of people whose livelihood is entirely dependent on Cinema.
We have seen many charity works from the top cinema celebs for their respective industry workers, but the Tamil movie fraternity took one step ahead and announced a movie, and the revenue generated through that movie will be used for the cinema workers who had faced tough times during the pandemic.
The important catch of this project is Maniratnam will be co-producing this film and also the cast and crew are not accepting remuneration for this particular film. This is a web anthology film and is going to be streamed on Netflix. As the title suggests the movie is based on the nine ‘rasas’ and also many notable and star directors, actors and crew are part of this film.
Well, this is surely a great initiative but there’s another reason why this particular film is interesting for Tamil cinema. ‘Navarasa’ is having stars like Suriya and Vijay Sethupathi in it, this is the first time in Tamil cinema, a huge star is going to be a part of the original OTT film.
A star like Suriya, who is a huge mass hero and with a huge market across the south of India, opted to act in an OTT original is itself a huge gesture which makes us understand where the OTT is going to head in the future. This may be a dynamic changing move from Suriya and a positive sign for the OTT platforms.
Undoubtedly this year has been a fruitful one for the OTT platforms but there were only a few films that received accolades, and this scenario made them concentrate more on the production of original content. The entry into the regional market has been a slow one, but the way they are heading has been promising.
So, the through film ‘Navarasa’ it will be more interesting to see how the traditional theatre-going audience would react to the big starts debuting in OTT originals and the reach of this particular film may also set some dynamics related to the reception in the regional market as well.
