Sunil Kumar Desai’s recently-released poster of his upcoming film Udgharsha, is garnering eyeballs for its unusual design of two set of hands, a knife and a pool of blood. In the mystery suspense-thriller with a tagline, ‘Battle at its peak’, the filmmaker says that ‘hands and legs will do the talking’ in his film or at least in the posters. To be released in Kannada, Telugu and Tamil, the film has a diverse cast that includes Thakur Anoop Singh of Singham 3 fame, Dhansika, who was associated with Kabali, and Prabhakar, who shot into limelight with Bahubali. The film is made under the banner, D-Creations, and has Bollywood music composer, Sanjay Chowdary scoring the music. While Kemparaju is editor of the film, Ravi Varma will perform stunts, and Vishnu Vardhan and P Rajan as the film’s cinematographer.
Coming from the maker of Tarka, Uthkarsha, Nishkarsha, Sangarsha, Marma, Kshana Khsana, Sunil seems to have figured out the promotional formula. The poster itself is already sending shivers down spines. Currently, at the edit desk, the director says the intention of the posters is to grab attention towards the story and characters, rather than just focussing on the lead pair. “I am working on posters that will include only hands, legs, eyes, face shadows. Only in the end will a face to the characters be put on the poster,” says the director, who is going along with the film’s theme. “I want to keep the suspense going and keep the audience guessing about whose hands and legs are on the posters,” he says.
Only 20 minutes of dialogue in the film
Udgharsha is about a murder mystery that takes place in a resort on New Year’s Day. “A 10-minute incident has been turned into a full-length feature film. In fact, the film has only 20 minutes of dialogue, the rest of the film will contain shots, music and effects. My film mostly runs on visual narration. Characters will have dialogues only in necessary situations,” says Sunil, who wants to get rid of the ‘hero-heroine focus’ concept. “For me, every character is equally important,” he adds.
Film shot in Madikeri prior to floods
The film’s to be ready by October, will released in three languages. “The initial plan was to release it in four languages, but owing to the floods in Kerala, I dropped the idea of releasing it in Malayalam. While Udgharsha can be treated as a universal subject, technology has given us a platform to release it in any number of languages. The dubbing has been completed in Kannada. We will be going to a dubbing studio in Chennai today, where the Tamil version will be dubbed, which will then be followed with the Telugu version,” he says.
While the film has been shot in Hyderabad, Kerala and Bengaluru, incidentally, most of the film’s shoot took place in portions of Madikeri, which he says, has now vanished. “We managed to capture the beauty of Madikeri before the floods hit,” he says.