Three years after his politically charged ‘Kaala’, Pa Ranjith returns with ‘Sarpatta Parambarai’, a period sports drama set in the 1970s. The film has Arya, Pasupathy, Kalaiyarasan, and John Vijay in prominent roles.
The filmmaker calls this to be an ambitious project he had been planning since his debut ‘Attakathi’ (2012). ‘Sarpatta Parambarai’ is about the clash between two boxing clans Sarpatta and Idiyappa.
“The film shows the role of boxing in the lives of people of North Madras. It was exciting and challenging in equal measure to re-create the period,” Ranjith said in a press conference. Ranjith’s regular collaborator Santhosh Narayanan has composed the film’s music. The movie drops on Amazon Prime Video on July 22.
Ranjith is known to powerfully express his political ideologies through his films. His movies show Dalits as assertive people. “The reason why I got interested in the Sarpatta clan was that it had working-class people, fishermen, and Dalits,” says the filmmaker.
Ranjith wants people to notice his filmmaking skills as much as they discuss the subjects of his films. “This film too will discuss political issues of the time,” he says. Perhaps the vastness of the story forced the director to underplay his political views, feels Arya.
“We know that Ranjith boldly discusses social issues in his films. But in this case, the script itself is so huge that he had little space for his ideologies. In the film, his focus was on telling the life stories of so many people. Perhaps he wanted to treat this film in that manner,” explains Arya.
The actor hopes ‘Sarpatta Parambarai’ provides a big fillip to a career that’s blown hot and cold in the last decade. “Definitely, in terms of the film’s scale and the expectations from it, this is my biggest project,” he says.
His physical transformation had its share of challenges, he says. “I took to boxing five years ago. I love the explosive energy that goes into it. We shot the film just before the first lockdown. The uncertainty around the pandemic was mentally draining. I wasn’t sure for how long I had to maintain my physic and when the shooting would resume,” he recollects.