Cinema is an art form for entertainment and it should not be misused, popular Malayalam actor Tovino Thomas said while responding to questions on the film The Kerala Story. The film, which released on May 5, stirred controversy for its alleged propaganda in painting a poor picture of Kerala, portraying it as a state that produced thousands of women terrorists. Tovino told The Indian Express that it was not the story of Kerala, the place he was born and raised in. The actor was in Mumbai to promote his film 2018 based on the Kerala floods of that year,
Tovino said that he had not watched the film or spoken to anyone who did, but he had seen the trailer that announced the controversial number of 32,000 women who were supposed to have converted to Islam and joined the ISIS camps in Afghanistan. Tovino, one of the first Malayalam actors to speak about the film, asked why this number, 32,000, was mentioned in the first place, even though later it was corrected to three in the trailer. He urged people not to naively believe everything that they heard or let anyone “feed misinformation”, but to think, rationalise, and decide for themselves.
In 2018, which released the same day as The Kerala Story, Tovino plays one of the heroes of the Kerala floods of 2018 that the film is based on. During the promotion, Tovino said that he had seen millions of people – not 3 or 32,000 – come together to help each other during the floods of 2018. The film, directed by Jude Anthany Joseph, has been the subject of a lot of discussion for its positive portrayal of the state. People in Kerala shared vignettes from the film as the ‘real Kerala Story’.