Habeebi music launches with Sam C.S. and a long row of directors backing Meera Kathiravan

Meera Kathiravan’s Habeebi had its music release on Monday in Chennai, with Sam C.S.’s album going public and a directors’ line-up on stage that ran deeper than most launches manage. Vetrimaaran, Mysskin, Ameer, Pa. Ranjith, Cheran, Suseenthiran, Pandiraj, Leena Manimekalai, Magizh Thirumeni, Zakaria Mohammed and a row of others sat through the speeches; Parthiban, Samuthirakani and Nasser turned up from the acting side; Kasturi Raja, who is in the film himself, was there for his first outing as an actor; and the night closed with director Ram of Romeo Pictures stepping in as the worldwide releasing partner.

Habeebi is set in a Tamil Muslim milieu and tracks three generations of women against a backdrop of handloom weavers losing trade to machines, men leaving for the Gulf, and joint families coming apart. Magizh Thirumeni, who has seen the film, called it a document of a way of life, a period and a culture. Leena Manimekalai framed it less as a Muslim film and more as a three-generation women’s story, which is where her satisfaction sat. Vetrimaaran called it “an important film for me”, reading it as one that takes a period setting and slips into 2026 cleanly.

Kasturi Raja, in the role that the speeches kept circling back to, was the part of the evening with the loudest individual reactions. His character was originally written as a Hindu man; Meera Kathiravan rewrote him as a Muslim once Kasturi Raja came on. “I am a thousand-percent Hindu,” Kasturi Raja said. “Meera Kathiravan rewrote me as a Muslim. That is a rebirth.” Mysskin, taking his slot at the mic, said Kasturi Raja had acted “three times better than Dhanush”, a line that drew the loudest applause of the night. Kasturi Raja said he had not yet watched the film and intended to first see it inside a theatre with a paying audience.

Director Ram, on as the worldwide release partner through Romeo Pictures, used his time at the mic for the framing work the film will need outside the room. “No green amulet, no walk past a butcher shop, no biryani montage,” he said. “The image we have built up of this community is what this film breaks. This is the first proper Tamil Muslim film.” He closed with a dua for the release.

Meera Kathiravan saved a small surprise for himself. The film, he said, was not directed by him. He has kept the actual director’s name back for a separate reveal still to come. His own name, he added, is half his mother’s: she was Meera, and he added Kathiravan when he came into cinema because he wanted a Tamil identity attached. The film was given a working space, he said, by an Iyengar in an agraharam who heard out the story of a man named Muhammad Yusuf and offered his house for it anyway. “Love and humanity sit above religion and caste,” he said. “Habeebi is that film. The film directed me, not the other way around.”

Ameer pushed against the framing of Habeebi as a Muslim-community film at all, calling it a Tamil society film about a community Tamil cinema had forgotten to make. Mysskin said he had cried at a love film for the first time in years. Pa. Ranjith, whose own Thangalaan made the same argument about Tamil cinema’s appetite for non-mainstream stories, placed Habeebi in the line of insight into Muslim life he had previously had to find in literature and in Malayalam cinema. Cheran, who described feeling like a character inside the film, asked critics to give it a fair hearing.

The album is the technical talking point. Sam C.S. composed the score, and the team has recreated the voice of the late playback singer Nagore E.M. Hanifa using AI for a track titled Vallone, framed by the producers as a cultural tribute rather than a stunt. Sam and Meera, by their own accounts, fought hard during the making and now describe each other as close friends.

The political side showed up too. TVK MLA Mustafa said he had not been to a film since 2007 but would make an exception for Habeebi and predicted Chief Minister Vijay would do the same, an evening of film-industry visits to the new chief minister’s office running alongside this one in the news cycle. Mysskin closed his slot by nodding to RJ Balaji’s Karuppu, which has opened well, as the kind of run Habeebi will want.

Habeebi has cleared censors with a U certificate. A theatrical release date is expected next.