Seenu Ramasamy asks CM Vijay to put cinema appreciation on the school timetable

Director Seenu Ramasamy has put out a video appeal asking Chief Minister Vijay to bring cinema appreciation education into Tamil Nadu schools, pegged to the release of his new book “Cinemavin Aanma” (The Soul of Cinema) from Sandhiya Publications.

The pitch: schools already teach drawing and sport under co-curricular study without expecting every child to grow up as a painter or athlete, and cinema literacy should sit on the same shelf. Seenu Ramasamy calls cinema appreciation as basic as the Sathunavu Thittam midday meal scheme, framing it as a counterweight to a generation of kids spending most of their hours on a phone. The book, by his own account, is not for children. It is a guide for primary-school teachers and cinema students built off 15 years of screening films for kids from different backgrounds and writing up what worked, structured for Classes 1 to 5.

His specific ask to the new TVK government, also captured in the video: install “home theatre” facilities in every school from primary up to Class 12, where curated films can be screened the way science labs are used for experiments. “Cinema must be embraced as a form of education,” he says. The appeal lands in a stretch where cinema figures have been turning up at CM Vijay’s office in his first weeks, most of them with congratulations rather than a policy memo.