Pavan Wadeyar-Sagar Puranik’s National Award-winning film, Dollu, sets its theatrical release date

Kannada director-producer Pavan Wadeyar’s debut production is a film called Dollu, directed by Sagar Puranik, for who this is his first feature. The film, which won a lot of accolades during its festival run, was, most recently, adjudged Best Regional Fillm – Kannada, at the National Film Awards. Dollu won a second award too, for Best Audiography in the category meant for a sync sound movie. This is currently under the purview of the organizers as there’s been a jury error.

Pavan, who launched his home banner with the intention of making good parallel cinema, a genre that he enjoys but says is incapable of working in, has been clear that irrespective of its box office outcome, Dollu would be given a theatrical release. A decision that got a further impetus after the National Awards. Pavan and Sagar had been looking for a good window to release the film and the latest we hear is that it will be in theatres on August 26.

In an earlier conversation with OTTplay, Pavan had explained the objective behind his production house and why he chose to begin his journey as a producer with Dollu. “I have always wanted to be associated with parallel cinema, so when I set out to launch my own banner, along with my wife, Apeksha, the plan was to back such films and give them a wider platform. I had seen Sagar’s National Award-winning short film, Mahaan Hutatma; I was quite fascinated by it and reached out to him sometime in 2020. I told him that I would be interested to produce a movie for him if he had any interesting subject about the culture of the state or the language, Kannada. He told me about Dollu, a story about a folk art from Karnataka,” he said.

The film, according to Sagar, is a fictional story about how urbanization affects a local Dollu Kunitha team and how the group then falls apart. This in turn has other repercussions, when a yearly tradition is stopped because the group has disbanded. What the protagonist sets out to do to continue the tradition is what Dollu is about.