Arulvaan trailer: a tribal girl's fight to go to school

The Arulvaan trailer opens on a question most films would not build around: what happens to children born somewhere with no school to walk to. Directed by Ganesh Vinayakan, the film sends a district collector into a remote hill settlement after a young tribal girl takes it on herself to ask for a classroom, and it reaches theatres worldwide on July 17.

Arulnithi plays that collector, Muthuvel, though he is quick to point the spotlight elsewhere. At the Chennai launch he admitted the title pulled him in first. “Arul is right there in Arulvaan, so I did think about it,” he said, before the story did the rest of the convincing. The director had asked for five days of his dates; that became ten, then fifteen, then twenty. He brought something personal to the part too, an elder sister who had wanted to become a collector and never got there, a wish he carried into the role. “Even in a full-length film, I’m not sure I could have taken on a character like this,” he said, calling it one of the most important films of his career.

The making of it reads like the plot’s own hardship. Shot in a roadless stretch of hills, the unit stayed put for eighteen days, the cast hauling their own tents up slopes with no proper food, no footpaths and the risk of animals after dark. Kaali Venkat, who has a smaller role, described a four-kilometre walk down to a valley location behind a local guide who moved so fast the actors could barely keep up, and a vertical climb steep enough to set his heart pounding. “If it was that hard for me in a small part, imagine what the leads went through,” he said. Cinematographer M Sukumar, long the go-to eye for forests, rivers and hill country, is the one who scouted the locations, and by the team’s account shot the whole thing as though it sat above the clouds.

Three names carry the film, Aarav, Arulnithi and, at its centre, Baby Krithika, whose eyes the story is told through. Aarav plays a fighter for the land and its people in the first half; Arulnithi’s collector takes up the cause in the second. Ganesh Vinayakan was blunt about who walks away with it, saying he expects a National Award to come Baby Krithika’s way for a performance delivered under those conditions. For the young actress, with no film family behind her, it was a first job spent alongside stars she had grown up watching. Her favourite piece of it is Allippoove, the GV Prakash Kumar song written by Yuga Bharathi, which she says she has played more than a hundred times.

Ramya Pandian, who had sworn off village stories for a while, said this one turned her around the moment she heard it. What stayed with her was not the difficulty of the shoot but the realisation that people actually live in a place that hard to reach. “There is a life there,” she said, praising Sukumar for shooting the hills on a scale she had not seen from him before, and singling out Aarav’s commitment, climbing cliffs and trees and acting under a freezing waterfall coated in sandalwood paste, as the thing she could not shake.

Ganesh Vinayakan, who earlier made Thaen, Thagaraaru and Veera Sivaji, said Arulvaan reversed the usual order of things: for once a producer came to him rather than the other way round. That producer is S G Saravanan, a businessman turned film obsessive who named his banner 90 Pictures for the number of films he means to make, and who scaled up what began as a modest project, pushing for senior technicians and bringing GV Prakash aboard. If the film works, the director reckons, half the credit belongs to his composer. It is produced by 90 Pictures Productions and presented by Sakthivelan’s Sakthi Film Factory, the banner that released Thaen, with M Sukumar on camera, Lawrence Kishore editing and Lalgudi Ilaiyaraaja handling art direction.

The film joins a small run of dramas willing to make the classroom the stakes, a lane that titles like Sir have worked before. Arulvaan opens in theatres worldwide on July 17.