Sathuranga Vettai 2 stirs after a decade: 'Let the film release first'

One of Tamil cinema’s longest-stuck films may finally be coming unstuck. Sathuranga Vettai 2, shot across 2016 and 2017 with Arvind Swamy and Trisha in the lead, has reportedly cleared the only hurdle that ever mattered: the money.

The sequel has sat with financier Madurai Anbuchezhiyan’s dues hanging over it for years. Theatre owner and distributor Tiruppur Subramaniam took the matter to him directly, and in a conversation with Chitra Lakshmanan described the outcome. Anbuchezhiyan has reportedly agreed to let the film out without an upfront settlement. “I do not want any money now. Let the film release first, and my share can be settled later from the revenue,” he is said to have told Subramaniam.

That sentence is rarer than any casting coup. In the film-financing economy, dues get recovered before a print moves, which is exactly why shelved films tend to stay shelved: everyone waits for someone else to blink first. A financier voluntarily moving himself to the back of the queue is the one manoeuvre that actually unlocks a film like this.

Sathuranga Vettai 2 follows the 2014 sleeper Sathuranga Vettai, the con-artist thriller that launched H Vinoth. Vinoth wrote the sequel but handed direction to NV Nirmal Kumar, and the lead passes from Natarajan Subramaniam to Arvind Swamy, with Trisha alongside him and Nassar, Radharavi, Daniel Balaji, Sriman, Dheeraj Rathnam, PV Chandramoulli and Kambam Shankar in the cast. Asvamitra composed the score.

The decade in limbo shows everywhere you look. The promotional stills have old thousand-rupee notes raining around the leads, currency that was demonetised in November 2016, while the film was still in production. Daniel Balaji has since died. So has Manobala, the producer who reportedly spent his final years trying to untangle the film’s finances; those close to the project say the delay weighed on him, and a release now would land as a late vindication of that effort. The leads, meanwhile, have moved on a full career phase: Trisha is coming off Karuppu and heads into Nelson’s KHxRK with Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan, while Arvind Swamy’s stock was refreshed by Meiyazhagan.

There is no release date yet. When one comes, Sathuranga Vettai 2 will reach screens roughly a decade after its cameras stopped rolling, a time capsule from mid-2010s Tamil cinema arriving with its money problems, for once, behind it.