HYDERABAD: With over half a million followers, the Instagram page ‘Fukkard’ has grown virulently popular since 2014. Fukkard publishes memes on Tollywood, politics, sports, all while maintaining authenticity and infotainment for the Telugus. The founders of the page share their interesting journey with CE.
Arun Nag, an aspiring director, along with his friend who wished to remain anonymous, started the page to aesthetically criticise commercial Tollywood movies in the pre-pandemic world. “We were frustrated with content put out via mainstream cinema, so we started the page to be critical about it. Over time we learnt, empathised, and understood better ways to be critical and toned down our cynicism. Since last year, the kind of content being produced by Tollywood has gotten better. We observed that some of the directors sought inspiration from story ideas of Tamil, Bengali and Malayali films tend to win the most number of national awards for producing independent films with moving plots,” Arun says.
“The Telugu cinema industry must produce more art cinema and story-based films because the audience has widened, and cinema, as we all know, directly influences the culture we’re part of,” opines Arun.
The page introduced to Tollywood the fleshing out of various categories from influential films — for eg. movies about round grey characters, movies helmed by women, et al. One of their primary aims while starting the page was to promote independent filmmakers who struggled to make great content.
Fukkard is known for being wary about not spreading any false information through the many updates on its page. “We verify the facts we put out, from the various sources in the industry to keep away from rumours. We followed a few pages on Bollywood keenly and decided that cinema is not merely about entertainment, it is also influenced by politics, so we diversified our genre. Now our page is fun and informative,” Arun shares.
He adds that the page doesn’t take any stand on any issue posted on their page: “We let the audience decide what’s right and what’s wrong. Our job is to merely tell them what’s happening around us.”
The popular page, which has more than 5,63,000+ followers, has some of the biggies of Tollywood, including writers, directors and actors, follow them. Arun and his small teamwork for nearly 18-20 hours a day on the page. They post close to 70-80 stories in a day on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Meanwhile, Arun is currently writing a script and is planning to direct an independent feature film himself.