The origins of Aby

The pond is about 20 feet deep. A boy runs a little distance and then jumps into the pond. For about one-and-a-half seconds he is on air. One and a half seconds when he feels he is flying. Srikant Murali has a distant dreamy look on his face when he narrates this childhood episode. His childhood is filled with such stories, the kind you might read in a 70s novel, full of the love for the old arts, and an innocence that has somehow stayed with him through the years. Today he has taken that old fantasy of flying and made a film out of it — his first feature film, Aby, — which has been facing a lot of issues for a long time.

“My film is the answer to all the accusations against me,” says Srikant, sitting in a Kochi restaurant. Aby has been having trouble with another film — Vimanam — with allegations that both have similar story lines. “But it is not. This is a story that Santhosh Echikkanam wrote, and a script we developed together with the lead actor Vineeth Sreenivasan.” Vineeth had got on board ever since Srikant told him the story. Over the years he has talked with many actors about many films he planned to make, but none worked out.

Srikant has been in the industry for more than 25 years. “It started with an ad that veteran filmmaker K.G. George had put in a newspaper. He said he liked the film Achuvettante Veedu and we would like it too, and then left his address at the bottom. So I wrote to him saying I wanted to work with him.” Srikant didn’t know what exactly he wanted to do in cinema. What he had with him were the years of learning Kathakali from C.R. Raman Namboothiri — Appu ettan to him — and a passion for cinema.

“I played one scene, as the crying son mourning the death of his father, played by Karamana Janardanan in Oru Yaathrayude Anthyam,” Srikant says of that first K.G. George film. Patiently he worked his way up, first through television, appearing in an episode of a Doordarshan series called Jathaka Kathakal, meeting M.G. Sreekumar through his brother Sudheer, who worked with Asianet. And meeting Priyadarshan through M.G. Sreekumar. Srikant assisted Priyadarshan in 13 films in Hindi and Malayalam, and in between made ad films and produced programmes for television — Kairali TV among them, bringing him close to Sreenivasan. And through Sreenivasan the distance to Vineeth became shorter.

Srikant says he never said Aby was autistic. “He is very brilliant, and speaks only when absolutely needed.” The film is expected to release on February 17, and Srikant feels it is a vital time, because children could be motivated by the film just before their March exams. “It shows the struggle of Aby, of the difficulty in being understood by others. Children could connect to that.”