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Rakshit Shetty on the future he envisions for filmmakers associated with his banner

The actor-filmmaker has been backing cinema that has little or not theatrical prospects too, because those are stories that come from the makers’ soul

Rakshit Shetty on the future he envisions for filmmakers associated with his banner
Rakshit Shetty

Last Updated: 10.17 AM, Nov 11, 2023

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As a producer, Rakshit Shetty has been backing a lot of first-time filmmakers, many of who are his friends or have been working with him for a long time, irrespective of whether they are going to make money. The idea, for him, is to back great stories, like, for instance, his pal Sumanth Bhat’s directorial Mithya, which recently premiered at the Mumbai Film Festival, or Shishir Rajmohan’s Abracadabra, among others. Rakshit has known both Sumanth and Shishir since his short film making days about 15 years ago. But unlike him, they continued being software professionals owing to family constraints and responsibilities, while also serving as sounding boards for his scripts. They are among the few whose opinion on cinema he values and while he knew that they would step into filmmaking at some point, once Paramvah Studios took off and was on a healthy trajectory, Rakshit stepped into hasten their entry into cinema.

Speaking to Metrosaga, Rakshit explained that Paramvah began taking care of their monthly expenses, while freeing them up from IT work to concentrate on filmmaking instead. Both Mithya and Abracadabra are ready for audiences, but the how remains a question mark, because Rakshit acknowledges that both are not films that fall in the commercial cinema bracket and, hence, theatrical prospects are slim. As filmmakers, both Sumanth and Shishir are yet to figure out a more commercially viable form of story-telling, but Rakshit is supremely confident that they will get there, because he learnt it the hard way with Ulidavaru Kandante. While the film is celebrated as a classic today, back when it was in theatres, he did not make much money, which pushed him to making something like Kirik Party next.

“I explored a story that I wanted to tell, but when that did not work, I began thinking about a film that would work in theatres, which audiences and I would like and that is how Kirik Party came about. But my first film had to be something that came from my soul, before exploring my bandwidth of story-telling,” he says, adding that that is the trajectory he envisions for both Sumanth and Shishir as well.

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