I see the act of the govt entering people’s homes as violence: Santhosh

Director Santhosh, who has made a film on the 2016 jallikattu protests, is now working on a film based on the controversial Salem eight-lane highway project. Titled Pasumaivazhi Saalai, the film will have actors Pasupathy and Kishore, and the director says that talks are on with Prakash Raj and Nagarjuna to play a crucial character.
“I have a vocational training centre in Harur, and I was told that the proposed highway would pass by this centre.So, I went to check that out. It was extremely scary. They bring along 200 policemen every day to mark the spots with stones. This in itself seems to be a scare tactic. Only recently I learnt that the planning of this route was done through a consultant company in Switzerland, and that they haven’t even been here. They’ve marked out the route entirely through satellite imagery! Only when these surveyors go to the places marked on this route do they realise what actually exists in these places. The process of the surveyors physically marking up the route is itself traumatic for the villagers. The scenes that I saw there made me write a script, about a village that is affected by modernisation. The film begins in the recent past… say 2016, and shows what life is like in the village and then moves to the present, to show how these efforts impact the place. Finally, I intend to show what happened to the village once the project has been completed a couple of years later,” says the director.
He offers the similie of a bird that has to flee its place because someone is cutting down the tree it lives on. “Imagine you are cutting down a tree; a bird resides on it. Doesn’t the bird have the same right as you over the tree? How do you decide your need is greater than the bird’s? It is a similar perspective that the film takes,” he says.
Santhosh has shot actual footage of the surveyors marking up the route and the locals’ reaction. He says that he did not face any issues. “These are images that have been captured by other media, too. And I did not do anything manipulative. No one told me not to take videos,” he says.
However, he says that the film will not take names and will not specify this particular highway project. “The story will make sense if I set it 20 years earlier or later, for displacement is something that has happened throughout history. I have heard about displacement of a populace, say for the building of a dam. This is the first time I’m witnessing it,” he says.
Santhosh says that he sees this as “arasa bayangaravadham”. “I see the very act of the government entering people’s homes as violence. I feel that there is a story about humanity here, and want to tell the story of the people getting displaced,” he signs off.