“Rather than calling as best Kannada/Telugu director, let’s start calling best Indian Director of Kannada language”.

National award-winning director and author Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri recently made a splash on the stage of the SIIMA Awards 2022. He presented Best Debut Director to Shankar Guru for his debut film Badava Rascals. Badava Rascal is a Kannada language action-comedy drama movie that was appreciated at the SIIMA. The movie was a hit among the masses.

Agnihotri, with Bollywood actor Ranveer Singh, arrived at the award ceremony to a red carpet welcome extended by SIIMA.  Vivek himself is an award-winning director whose film The Taskent Files (2019) starring Shweta Basu Prasad, Naseeruddin Shah, and Mithun Chakraborty bagged National Award. The Taskent Files was based on the death of former Prime Minister of India Lal Bahadur Shastri Ji. It did exceptionally well at the box office. He has also directed one of the most successful films of recent times, The Kashmir Files (2022), which is a fictional storyline based on the events of the 1990s, the exodus of Kashmiri Hindus from the state of Kashmir. The Kashmir Files stars Mithun Chakraborty, Anupam Kher, Darshan Kumar, and Pallavi Joshi. The film was widely acclaimed by the public, and hence, was a huge success. The worldwide box office collection of the film was around ₹340 crore. The filmmaker is all set to start work on his new project The Delhi Files.

Along with his distinctive choices of storylines for his films and books authored, Agnihotri is known to be very vocal in his opinions on various socio-political issues. After presenting awards on the stage of SIIMA 2022, Vivek quoted with his Twitter handle that “Rather than calling as best Kannada/Telugu director, let’s start calling best Indian Director of Kannada language”.

He further said that instead of calling the film industry of other languages South or North, let’s call it the Indian Film Industry of different languages.

Previously regional film industries have delivered some thumping successes and marked their immense impact pan India. Vivek’s appeal at SIIMA 2022 has once again sparked ongoing discussions to minimise the regional division in the Indian Film Industry.