Shivarajkumar and Abishan Jeevinth pair for a father-son drama

A new banner has stepped into Tamil cinema, and it has opened with a pairing few would have predicted. Drama Company, the production house run by Balamurugan A, has launched its first film with Kannada superstar Shivarajkumar and Abishan Jeevinth in the lead, a father-son drama that began shooting in Chennai the same week it was announced.

The casting is the talking point. Shivarajkumar, the Karunada Chakravarthy with more than a hundred films behind him, takes the senior role opposite Abishan Jeevinth, who in the space of one year has had two very different breakouts: as the director of the blockbuster Tourist Family and as a leading man in With Love. Here he stays in front of the camera, sharing the frame with one of the south’s most established stars.

The film is the directorial debut of Gowtham Sivaraman, and the pairing first flagged weeks ago now has a camera rolling behind it. It was launched with a traditional pooja in Chennai, the clapboard reading Production No. 1, with a heavy turnout of industry names lending the new banner their presence: Soundarya Rajinikanth, Kalaipuli S Thanu, C Premkumar, R D Raja, Manikandan, Ken Karunas and Rishikanth among them.

The two female leads come with recent hits behind them. Shivani Nagaram, who broke through in the Telugu blockbuster Little Hearts, makes her Tamil debut here, and Yogalakshmi, seen in the Heart Beat series and in Tourist Family, plays the other lead. The supporting cast includes Gana Vinoth, Sangeetha Madhavan and Benjamin.

Behind the camera, Leon James composes the music and Pragadeesh Prabhu handles cinematography, with Suresh Kumar editing and Swathi Ramakrishnan on costumes. The shoot is moving briskly in Chennai, and the still-untitled film is the first card Drama Company is playing, a debut director and a cross-language lead pairing staked on a single story.