Hers is a face that stays with you, even if she is on screen only for a few precious shots. The characters somehow leave that imprint – a tribal policewoman caught up in the revenge drama between two men, a woman who fights against cybercrime when a fake video of hers goes online, a student driven to suicide by a casteist professor. Dhanya Ananya says that it began to happen shortly after her foray into films from theatre. The actor, only a few years old in Malayalam cinema, has just played another impressive character in Saudi Vellakka, a film that released last week, made by Tharun Moorthy, the director of the acclaimed Operation Java.
“My very first appearance in a film was in Athiran, in which I played an insignificant role, just to start from somewhere in cinema,” Dhanya says candidly. She displays an admirable clarity when she talks about the choices she has made in life. Films were nowhere in the picture until she reached her college years in Mar Ivanios of Thiruvananthapuram. There, like quite many of her generation, she began getting involved in short films and music videos.
Dhanya soon realised she enjoyed acting. “I wanted to learn more about it and began attending theatre workshops. I decided to do my Master of Arts to learn acting at the Sree Sankaracharya University,” she says.
Dhanya in Saudi Vellakka
After two years though, she still didn’t plunge head first into acting. Doubts still lurked in her mind and she had to go through a few other alternatives – a Biennale project, a temporary training assignment in Lucknow – before deciding that acting was her calling and nothing else would work. She headed to theatre arts, to the sets of her teacher’s production Thuramukham. While there, someone asked her about playing a role ‘with not much to perform’ in Athiran. She said yes.
After that came Lal Jose’s 41, and Dhanya got more screen space. From 41 she went to Ayyappanum Koshiyum, playing the short role of a tribal policewoman with lasting impact. The student who is traumatised by her teacher’s taunts appeared in Jana Gana Mana. Mammootty’s Bheeshma Parvam, Tharun’s Operation Java, and now Saudi Vellakka also followed.
In Saudi, however, her familiar, accented voice is missing. Actor Srindaa dubs for Dhanya’s enterprising character of Naseema. Dhanya is remarkable as the nagging woman to her rather vulnerable husband, picking fights with the aged mother-in-law, while also looking after her. Naseema is annoyingly never quiet. “She is self-centred, but also one who does not take society’s norms so seriously. If I land in the situations that she comes across, I would probably not react the way she does,” Dhanya says with a short laugh.
Watch: Trailer of Saudi Vellakka
She would have preferred to dub for her character, but she respects the director’s decision, Dhanya says.
Her next — Arik — also sounds like a film to look out for, coming from VS Sanoj, a journalist turned filmmaker, who was chosen by the Kerala State Film Development Corporation in its project to fund two new directors from the SC/ST community.