Exclusive! Tovino, Aishwarya Lekshmi’s Kaanekkaane will be an OTT release, confirms Manu Ashokan

Tovino Thomas seems to have a slew of OTT releases coming up in the next few months. Uyare director Manu Ashokan’s Kaanekkaane is one among them, OTTplay has exclusively learnt.

On the status of the film scripted by award-winning scriptwriters Bobby and Sanjay, Manu tells us, “It will be an OTT release but we haven’t confirmed the platform yet as the final talks are still going on.”

Kaanekkaane, which also has Aishwarya Lekshmi, Suraj Venjaramoodu and Shruti Ramachandran in lead roles, is a performance-driven film about raw human relationships and emotions.

Ask Manu if the film organically lent itself to the OTT viewing sensibilities and the filmmakers says, “Definitely. We planned it for an OTT release. We landed on the subject during the beginning of the pandemic and so we naturally took OTT into consideration. But after the output was ready, we thought it would also work out in theatres.”

The team had recently watched the film together. “It wasn’t a preview or anything. Tovino and Suraj ettan wanted to watch the film and so we had arranged it at the music director’s studio,” says the director, who had earlier collaborated with Tovino, Bobby and Sanjay in Parvathy-starrer Uyare.

The film had completed its shoot last year after the lockdown restrictions were lifted. In an earlier interview with us, Aishwarya Lekshmi had talked about working in Kaanekkaane.

“When I did Kaanekkane, I was effectively shooting after a gap of almost seven months because we started filming in November after the lockdown was lifted,” she said. “Manu sir is one of those directors who wants the actors to perform as per the script because they want what they have conceived. It’s again something that I learnt from Varathan and it has helped me in another film too. But he is a very cool director. He might be shooting a serious subject but then he cracks all these jokes and I have actually asked him, ‘Were you the one who shot Uyare?’”