After headlining Madras Matinee last year, Kaali Venkat is back in the lead in an untitled 1995-set family drama that has gone on floors with a pooja ceremony. The film is the feature debut of P. Vijay Karthikeyan, produced under P Square Entertainment and Cinema Tour Entertainment by Sarath Babu, with Surya Devi as co-producer. The cast announcement pins it squarely to the kind of ensemble character-drama Kaali Venkat’s recent lead work has built its reputation on.
The film’s premise, as the director described it at the launch, is narrow in the way family dramas sometimes need to be. “Set in 1995, it is a family drama centred on the story of a father who struggles to transfer his son, currently studying in a government school, to a private school. The movie is designed to be a delightful, wholesome experience for the whole family.” That setup sits on a real moment in Tamil Nadu’s education timeline. The Tamil Nadu Compulsory Elementary Education Act of 1994 had just come into force, and the 1995 amendment to the Tamil Nadu Recognised Private Schools Regulation Act tracked an early wave of aspirational parents moving children out of government schools. A father-son story about that migration is doing more than picking a nostalgic backdrop; it is picking a specific social inflection point.
Kaali Venkat comes to the film off a run that has redrawn the shape of his career. Mundaasupatti and Thegidi established him as a scene-stealing supporting act in 2014. Gargi in 2022 won him the Filmfare South award for Best Supporting Actor. The shift to leading roles came only recently, first with Dhonima in 2024 and then with Madras Matinee in 2025, where he played an auto driver named Kannan. That film opened slowly, to first-day collections of about Rs 12 lakh, but word of mouth doubled its screens in the second week and it ended up earning close to Rs 2.43 crore before moving to Sun NXT and Prime Video. Several outlets called it career-defining. This new film makes his third consecutive lead.
Around him, the ensemble is designed to carry weight. Aadukalam Naren, a veteran of sixty-plus films from Aadukalam and Asuran to Pushpa: The Rule, brings the senior character-actor gravitas. Mime Gopi and Jayaprakash round out the older cohort. Reshma Muralidharan, best known to Tamil audiences from television work on Zee Tamil’s Poove Poochudava and Nenjathai Killadhe, makes the film transition here. Jensen Diwakar, who broke in with Arun Karthick’s Nasir and has been building through Veeran and Aan Paavam Pollathathu, joins the line-up. Vinodhini features, as does VJ Paru, currently a contestant on Bigg Boss Tamil 9. Sarath Babu is also credited in the cast announcement.
Behind the camera, Jen Martin composes the music, Dinesh Kumar is the cinematographer, and Sakti Tiru is editing. Hasini handles art, Rambo Vimal the stunts, Kavitha the costumes, and Radhika the choreography. The lyric credits are split across Vivek, Karthik Netha, Poet Saradhi and Umadevi. Shooting will move between Sivagangai and Chennai.
The production still does not have a title. For Kaali Venkat, that is a secondary question. The run Dhonima began and Madras Matinee consolidated is the larger story.