Addressing a series of issues faced by the Tamil film industry, including the postponement of superstar Vijay’sJana Nayagan, director Karthik Subbaraj called for “unity” from people in the film fraternity to “save cinema”.
Karthik highlighted the problem of low-budget and indie movies struggling to find theatres and opened up on the delay in issuance of censor certificates to marquee projects such as Jana Nayagan and the Sivakarthikeyan-starrer Parasakthi.
“The strict timeline rules for censors (India and overseas) is really hard to follow,” he wrote. “It puts a lot of pressure on filmmakers during the post-production stage, especially when you are doing a big budget film, having already announced the release date. With current timeline rules, for both Indian and overseas censors, the ideal time for a film to be completed is three months before the release date, and that’s highly impossible for many reasons. The system has to be streamlined and made a bit easy for filmmakers.”
The filmmaker also came in support of the movie Salliyargal, a war drama. “Theatres need to be supportive of indie movies. Big satellite and & OTT players aren’t keen on buying indie films, leaving theatres as the only source for revenue for these low-budget movies. You are killing cinema by not giving theatres to such movies.”
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Karthik urged fans and people from the film industry to unite to save the art form. “Please, let’s all from the film fraternity keep aside fan wars, political reasoning, personal agendas and hate campaigns, and join together to do something optimistic to save cinema.”
Vijay’s Jana Nayagan, directed by H Vinoth and produced by KVN Productions, was postponed after the Madras High Court reserved orders on a writ petition filed by the makers against the non-issuance of the film’s censor certificate by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC). A new release date is yet to be announced.
