A 10-year-old Indian boy is close to becoming one of the world’s youngest directors with his first film being prepared for an April release.
Writer, actor, director and still not yet a teenager, Kishan Shrikanth spent Monday on his film set putting the final touches to a song-and-dance sequence in his first movie.
”It took three days to shoot. But I am happy with it,” the 10-year-old prodigy said. Once the choreographer had ”got the concept” behind the song, it was an easy job, he added.
Known as Master Kishan, the young man is a local hero in his home city of Bangalore, the country’s IT capital. An actor for the past six years, he has already appeared in 24 films and 1 000 episodes of a local-language popular soap opera.
The storyline to C/O Footpath [Care of Footpath], with a faint echo of Oliver Twist, is about the life of a street urchin drugged by a woman who uses him as a begging prop. It impressed Bollywood enough to attract big names, including the actor Jackie Shroff, who comes from a humble background.
Kishan said: ”I saw the kids selling newspapers on the streets at the traffic lights and felt sad. I asked my dad why they had to do this. He told me that they were not like us. They did not go to school or study and they had to work for a living. I wanted to talk about their life.”
Kishan, whose script grew out of a short story he wrote, said he hopes the film will encourage ”slum children to go to school”, and that Footpath is ”for all the underprivileged children of the world”.
The £90 000, 135-minute film is being produced by Kishan’s mother, Shailaja, who is a movie music director. It is being shot in the southern city of Madras and in Mumbai, home to Bollywood, the world’s most prolific film industry. Kishan’s film will be dubbed in Hindi and in the south Indian languages of Tamil and Kannada.
”I’m ready with 85% of the film and looking at an April release,” he said on Monday.
Kishan, who says that Bollywood’s Amitabh Bachchan and Hollywood star Arnold Schwarzenegger are his favourite actors, is on the lookout for new material.
”Actually I do not have time at the moment for school. I think I’ll go back in a month after this film is done. But I do not miss it.” — Guardian Unlimited Â