“Instead of openly telling a woman what she can or cannot make and looking bad while doing so, people in the industry say things like, ‘You will handle soft subjects really well’, be it rom-coms or slice of life films. Over the years, however, industry experts believe that women behind the camera in South Indian cinema have been often relegated to or expected to do only a certain kind of ‘light’ cinema, a bias that Kongara has managed to thwart. There have also been a handful of other pioneers like Vijaya Nirmala, P Bhanumathi, Jayadevi, Suhasini Maniratnam and Revathy. There was TP Rajalakshmi, who directed Tamil films as early as the 1930s. Kongara is certainly not the first ‘female filmmaker’ in the Tamil or the South Indian film industry. “Time is not asking for compromises anymore.” The difference in her approach hereon, having cemented her success as a bankable filmmaker of realistic cinema, is that Kongara has now reached a position where she will not budge from her vision and voice for a film, “not with my producers, not with my superstar actors, not with anybody”, she says. She is now working on the script for the Hindi remake of Soorarai Pottru, setting it in a different cultural mileu, while looking at long-format projects for OTT and developing a couple of film projects, something that is likely to keep her busy for the next three years at the least. Much has been happening with Kongara since. The film, which was made on a budget of ₹60-70 crore, garnered over 100 million views just over the weekend of its release. While her comeback project, the bilingual sports drama Irudhi Suttru / Saala Khadoos (2016) starring R Madhavan and Ritika Singh was well-received and even won Singh a special jury award by the National Awards Committee, the spotlight shined on Kongara since 2020, with the successes of two of her short films for anthologies on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, and her ambitious big-budget OTT release Soorarai Pottru starring Suriya and Aparna Balamurali, which is based on the entrepreneurial journey of Air Deccan founder Captain GR Gopinath and his vision of creating a low-cost airline. My vision was corrupted by various influences and it led to a traumatic six-year hiatus,” says Kongara, who confesses to having contemplated leaving the film industry behind to make a career out of growing organic vegetables or running a restaurant. “I was sidelined in my first film Drohi, which got a limited release and tanked. That is tougher than it sounds, she tells Forbes India over a video call from her office in Chennai, because in a male-dominated industry with powerful, high-profile stakeholders involved with every project, there are 50 different opinions that people have about how you should go about making your film. This true power is simply having the choice to make whatever films she wants to make, in the way she wants to make them. After two decades in the entertainment business, starting as a screenwriter, then as an assistant director to Mani Ratnam and eventually at the helm of her own films, Kongara believes that now is the time she has attained true power in the Tamil cinema industry. ‘Being a woman, you have made such a brilliant film’ is a backhanded compliment that often comes Sudha Kongara’s way. Image: Balaji Gangadharan for Forbes India Sudha Kongara Prasad, an film director and screenwriter
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