She faced her career’s first movie camera in St Petersburg, a place where Malayalam cinema never went for shooting before. However, the city clad in snow reminded the Mumbai girl of Nainital, as her father belongs to the snow- falling hill station. After Russia, the crew landed in the coastal city of Kochi, which too had a link to her life. “I belong to the snow as well as the hot sun; a garhwali as well as a Malayali,” giggles Deepthi Sati, one of the two heroines of ‘Nee-Na’, the latest film by ace director Lal Jose, while adding in Malayalam, “pakuthi- pakuthi (fifty fifty)”.
As a child, she used to visit Kochi, her mother’s native place during the vacations. Though she cannot speak, the visits made her closer to her mother’s langugae. But the number of visits dwindled with her age, though she is close to the kith and kin.
The daughter of a charted accountant father and a banker mother had more leaning towards the line of art, unlike their calculations. Of course with their support. she started learning Bharatanatyam from the age of three, then Kathak and later moved on to contemporary jazz, hip hop and ball. “I will start aerial dance classes once I return to Mumbai. I know most of the dances but nothing is there in the film”. She also had her lessons in classical music in addition to sketching. “Acting was my dream, always. So I did plays from school days,” says the girl whose tryst with the theatre includes noted Prithvi and the Ekjute in her home town.
After schooling at Canossa convent High School, the lone daughter of Divyesh Sati and Madhuri Sati spent five years at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai where she completed BBA, because of a promise she made before moving into ramps and pageants. She bagged the Miss Kerala and Miss India Princess in 2013, then emerged as the top five in the Femina Miss India 2014 and got on to Zoom TV as an anchor. Meanwhile she did some ads. Soon came ‘Nee-Na’. It was fashion photographer Reji Bhasker who forwarded her snaps to Lal Jose who was frantically searching for a perfect girl to portray the character penned by Venugopal Ramachandran Nair.
Deepthi describes herself as a linguaphile. “I am fluent in more than half a dozen tongues. Pahadi, from father, Marathi from the city where I was born and brought up, Gujarati from friends and French which I learnt at College. But I was least adept in Malayalam as we stick to Hindi at home”, she says in stylish English.
The emotional drama deals with the life of a young woman of the new era, between 15 and 2. Deepthi plays the tomboyish character Neena, a creative director at an ad agency who enters the life of Vipin Panicker (Vijay Babu) and Nalini (Ann Augustine)for a brief period of time. “Though tomboyish, Neena is unpredictable. You cannot expect what she will be doing in the next moment”. She says. The character, the name of her eldest cousin, is close to her in many ways including bike riding. But the party animal swears she had to ‘learn smoking and drinking for the character’.
The director who holds the credit for introducing nearly a dozen female leads to Malayalam cinema including Kavya Madhavan and Samvrutha Sunil, is all praise for his new find. “ Deepthi stands out from a lot of actors, both male and female, who consider their vocation as a mere pass time. Her dedication to acting astonishes me. She did not know how to speak Malayalam. The way she memorises her scene and dialogues and the way she expresses with proper modulation should be a lesson for others. Many might have progressed into good actors later, but Deepthi is the one who proved her mettle in the very first movie,” says Lal Jose.
The 40 days of shooting made Deepthi, more close to this part of her family and to take films as a serious business. “ I will be here,” she affirms.