Sandalwood And The Ray Of Hope | Under Lens

Talking about Kannada Film Industry, it is one of the most dominant cine-industries in whole of India I believe only in terms of numbers movies being released every week... unfortunately, not in terms of quality. Every week around 2 to 3 movie would be released each movie competing with other. The Audience faces great trouble selecting best of the movies. Due to uncontrolled number of movies being released, most of the movies turn out to be box-office disasters. I strongly believe it is the peak time now to decide on the number of movies and quality of movies. Add to that most of the movies released would be re-make or re-mix movies. However even in such a pitiable situation, we cannot completely say Sandalwood is worst. We have a few rays of hope.

Yogaraj Bhat whose Mungaru Male had collected Rs. 75 Crores in Box office with investment of just Rs.1 Crore. His debut movie “Mani” which was acclaimed by reviewers had won 5 state awards. Albeit this movie is one of the masterpieces of sandalwood, it was not a commercial success. On the contrary, his 2^nd movie- Ranga (S.S.L.C), which I feel was worst of Mr.Bhat, did fairly well at box-office. Mungaru Male was his 3^rd movie followed by Gaalipata, Manasare, Pancharnagi, Paramatma... all were success at box office and each of them celebrated 100 days. On an average it is believed that all the Yogaraj Bhat movies collect at least 4 times of the investment. Though media claims that Paramatma was not great, it did make any loss for neither producers nor the distributors.

The next director under my scanner would be Soori, who came to lime light with success of Duniya which was released in the year 2007 and was a major commercial success. The very low budget movie made in about 80 Lakhs had collected around 20 crores. His next movie “Inthi Ninna Preethiya” was not successful at box office. But personally I believe that the movie was great.  His next movies Junglee and Jackie were commercial success. Infact, “Jackie” was the biggest hit of year 2010.

The other two young faces would be Guruprasad with his two commercial success low budget off-beat movies “Mata” and “Yeddelu Manjunatha”. The next would be Shashank with commercial success movie like Sixer, Moggina Manasu, Krishanan Love Story and Jarasandha. Waiting for more to come...

Written By: Sandeep Shetty