How three sisters came together to produce ‘Uyare’
It was 6 pm when they sat on the lawns outside. Sisters Shenuga, Shegna and Sherga watched as the shooting of the film went on. They never missed a day, this was their first film as producers and they were eager to learn everything they could about filmmaking. That evening, sitting on the lawns with the crew, they didn’t feel the time passing, till they saw at first the newspaper boy and then the milkman. It was morning already!
“Time just passed by. Every shooting day was like that. We never missed anything, any hour. Honestly, it never even occurred to us that there could be any issue in us being women and working so late into the night. It was only when an outsider who visited the sets pointed out that there were so many women on the set that we we even noticed it,” says Sherga, the youngest of the three sisters who've produced the film Uyare, which tells the story of an acid attack survivor, played by Parvathy.
Their production company is called SCube Films.
Their father PV Gangadharan has been producing Malayalam films for nearly four decades, and has won many awards, including two National Awards for Kanakkinavu and Shantham. The daughters had not thought of film production earlier. Only Sherga has worked with her dad before, in films like Notebook and Achuvinte Amma. “But that was on the marketing side,” she says. She had also been working with the family’s automobile business till she took a break one and a half years ago, when Uyare came to them.
“We didn’t think we could produce a feature film till two years ago, when we got together to produce an album song called ‘Let’s take a break’. It was about spending one day without your mobile phone. After the song came out, we knew we could do production,” Sherga says.
The sisters began listening to scripts. They told their family friends Bobby and Sanjay, the well-known scriptwriter duo, to let them know if they came up with a new script. “We didn’t expect it all to happen so soon. They came home with a script and the whole family heard it out. It was our mother who said that we must take it. From our dad, we got the tip that if it was something which the story needed, we should never say no to a demand.”
It was their mother’s idea to give them these unique names – combinations of the parents’ names – Sherin and Gangadharan: Shenuga, Shegna and Sherga. “Bobby chettan would joke that we would need subtitles for our names!” Sherga laughs.
The three women have their own areas of interest in managing the company. Shenuga, for instance, takes care of the accounts. “But we managed it all together. We were most keen on learning every aspect of filmmaking, including the technical side. What really we marvelled at was the make-up – the hours that Parvathy took to don it and carry it, she couldn’t eat anything then. All that hard work paid off, that’s what we see now in theatres.”
They will do more films, Sherga says, when such good scripts come to them.