Kreem will dispel several myths surrounding the Dandupalya gang, says Agni Sridhar

Former gangster-turned-writer Agni Sridhar, who has been the force behind films like Edegarike, Aa Dinagalu and Head Bush, among others, has written another script. This time, though, the subject he’s chosen is not one is he has been directly involved with and is not based on his experiences. Sridhar, who has spent considerable amounts of time in jail owing to his underworld background, has put together a story based on what he saw and heard while incarcerated.

What piqued his interest was a particular gang of robbers, who supposedly orchestrated several heinous crimes, including rape and murder. Called the Dandupalya gang, this set was feared for how gruesome the murder scenes they left behind were. According to Sridhar, though, several of the brutal murders that have been attributed to the gang have other perpetrators. In fact, he believes that the spate of killings back then were actually human sacrifices of women and children.

But in a bid to show high crime clearance rates, law enforcement framed ‘innocent’ people who were already behind bars for petty crimes. Sridhar reckons that the Dandupalya gang never committed any of the heinous crimes they allegedly carried out. His film Kreem will set the record straight he says. Directed by Abhishek Basant, with Samyuktha Hegde in the lead role, Kreem explores how women and children from lower economic strata would become victims of human sacrifice. Speaking at the film’s first press briefing, he said that his research was based on an input from a commercial sex worker, who told him that not only was human sacrifice prevalent, but that women and children beggars were the common victims, as no one would bother if they went missing. In a year, as many as 400 of the recorded murder cases in the country are actually human sacrifices, he says.