When Anjali Patil walked in at the 31st Busan International Film Festival, people recalled her as the actress from With You, Without You (2012), Prasanna Vithanage’s Sri Lankan film that had premiered there too. This week, she was both the titular actor and producer of her independent Tamil film, Selvi, on the invisible lives of migrant home-care nurses. Directed by debutant Sailesh Rathnakumar, Selvi premiered in the Vision-Asia section and picked up two awards: Hylife Vision Award and the Taipei Film Commission Award.
In such Hindi films as Newton (2017), Mere Pyare Prime Minister (2018) and Kaun Pravin Tambe? (2022), one has seen Patil helm both seemingly simple to complex and layered characters with an unhurried ease and gravitas. She’s influenced by German contemporary dancer Pina Bausch, the mother of modern dance.
Patil’s Selvi takes on the weight of responsibility — her own, her family’s, even of her roommates. Thinking of herself, or stealing moments to sleep, is a luxury denied to her. “Selvi is a really complex character, unseen, average and mundane, something I get pulled towards. I wanted to play her,” says Patil, who has previously acted in Tamil films such as Pa. Ranjith’s and Rajinikanth’s Kaala (2018) and the psychological thriller Kuthiraivaal (2021).
Anjali Patil plays the titular Selvi in the Tamil independent film produced by her company Anahat Films.
Talking about his sound-driven film, with the audio helmed by Anand Krishnamoorthi (Ponniyin Selvan I & II), Rathnakumar, a writer-producer at Patil’s Anahat Films, says, “Selvi bridges the gap between arthouse and commercial.” Selvi received the Red Sea Fund (for post-production) and was a Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum (HAF) Work-in-Progress project, which gave it the Asian film market exposure.
The story comes from Rathnakumar’s cinematographer Bargav Sridhar who was introduced to the home-care industry when his mother suffered a lung ailment during COVID-19. “A lot of home-care nurses come from small towns (Nagercoil, Tirunelveli, etc.). When they enter the homes, all they bring is care. We don’t see the weight of their emotional burden and we felt compelled to tell this story,” says Rathnakumar, a Prague Film School alumnus who has assisted veteran editor B. Lenin on sound and music in films.
Stills from Selvi.
Debutant director Sailesh Rathnakumar at Busan International Film Festival. | Photo Credit: Stephanie Cornfield
Edited excerpts from a conversation with Patil and Rathnakumar:
In Selvi, there is an uncanny parallel of the migrant nurses’ story to Payal Kapadia’s Cannes Grand Prix winner All We Imagine As Light (2024).
Sailesh Rathnakumar: We didn’t have the intention of capitalising on what was happening in cinema at the time. We had already written Selvi before Payal’s film released. When we watched another film exploring a similar world, we felt that the premise we were handling (home-care nurses) and what we were communicating through Selvi was very different. It was a very strong emotional response rather than a calculated response.
Tamil cinema has not really had a parallel film movement like some other regional industries. Is that changing?
The landscape in Tamil cinema is changing. A lot of content-driven cinema has found its way into the commercial scene. But there is still a certain level of difficulty in making independent cinema sustainable.
I’m a very big fan of Mani Ratnam. Something he said in his book has stayed with me. He mentioned that he is a fan of (Robert) Bresson and other European filmmakers, but taking that path requires a lot of courage, especially in the commercial aspect of cinema, where it is driven by money and the pure merit of art is not very sustainable.
We didn’t intend to make pure arthouse cinema. We wanted to find a middle ground where people who like arthouse could appreciate it, and commercial audiences could also watch it.
Actor-director-producer Anjali Patil in Busan. | Photo Credit: Stephanie Cornfield
Anjali, how did you prepare to play a Tamil character when you are not a Tamilian?
Anjali Patil: When you are doing a character from a different culture, the most interesting point is the cultural nuances of that body, of that gender in that particular society. Me being a Maharashtrian girl who studied in Pune and Delhi, I have a different chemical texture to a Tamil girl.It is difficult picking up the language, even though I’ve been learning Tamil for over a year. We did extensive dubbing and then redubbed for me to sound more native, more local. We did the entire film again.
You’ve also worked in commercial Tamil films, how different was this experience?
A.P.: For Kaala, it worked because my character Puyal Charumathi Gaekwad was a Dharavi-girl based in Maharashtra. Also, in commercial films, I think it’s very easy for most of the actors, as they get dubbed by a local dubbing artist, for it to be accepted by the local masses, but for something like Selvi, which is so realistic and close to the performance, it had to be in my voice.
Tell us about going from acting to also producing/directing.
A.P.: I started Anahat Films in 2021 out of a desire to write and produce my own things. I have a lot of passion for documentaries, and directed one called Neither a Girl, Nor a Woman just after the pandemic.
I studied design and direction at Delhi’s National School of Drama, which most people don’t know. I am an accidental actor. I started acting around 2011-12, at a time when there were hardly any casting directors seeking out ‘real’ talent. You had to go meet directors in offices asking for work. It was that kind of a culture. I had to quit films and Mumbai in 2015, for a good four or five years (she returned to the city in 2018).
I was in talks about co-producing some projects. We did an Australian film called The Moogai (2024), which went to Sundance’s Midnight section. We co-produced [one of 19 producers] Baksho Bondi (Shadowbox; 2025) with Tillotama Shome, which opened at Berlinale.
When I read the long synopsis of Selvi, I was working on it as a producer. Then I thought, this is a really complex character, which is something I get pulled towards. I asked the team, ‘Can I play this as well?’ And they were like, ‘Yes, of course.’
Stills from the Tamil film Selvi.
Do you think regional cinema has more space for women-centric stories than Bollywood?
A.P.: One hundred per cent. A very basic reason is that when you come to a region, to a specific culture, the focus shifts to the literary aspect of the film. I feel women characters have more space and dimension in regional cinema because the weight of economics, unlike a Bollywood film or a pan-India ₹100 crore blockbuster, is less.
There are very few Hindi indies getting made. Most people are getting sucked into OTT, which took away the space for independent films. From Hindi films, I haven’t really received a lot of offers in the past few years because of an unfortunate popular belief: ‘Now that she’s producing and directing, why would she want to act?’ I’ve consciously avoided doing commercial advertisements or OTT because I don’t like to be exposed so much, it takes a lot out of me.
Recently, I met Anjali Menon, the director of Bangalore Days (2014), and she said one solid thing. She said, ‘See, Anjali, whatever happens, people will not give you enough respect when they meet you in person. The best way to answer everybody is at the box office. And the box office is gender-neutral. It’s the film that needs to work.’
I think Zoya Akhtar’s and Reema Kagti’s films have also been quite successful. I would talk about Toxic (2026) in terms of the effort and the scale. The film might have its own issues, but I still give it to her and the makers for standing up with this kind of experiment. We could see that they tried to do something. Then there is Bad Girl (2025) in Tamil, [Tribeny Rai’s] Shape of Momo (2025) and Sudha Kongara’s films.
Sai wrote Selvi with so much nuanced detail and the right gender politics. You don’t have to be a woman to write a really good film about women or show their complexity. It’s true the other way around, too.
Aside, I see my social media feed, I see boys getting beaten up but I see women and girls protesting, and that kind of makes me feel really, really proud and is giving strength to everybody. Women are reclaiming their space, in reel and real.
You’re directing a sci-fi film, titled Average Girl. Are you a fan of the genre? And what’s next in the commercial space?
A.P.: There are two kinds of films I like to write. One is magical realism, and the other is sci-fi. The reason probably is the years I spent studying Buddhist philosophy that changed my way of looking at time and space. I’m a fan of drama-portrait-character- driven films but magical realism is closer to my writing style. The sci-fi project is a very quirky film about a yes-girl of her family and in society.
I have a YRF show, a Netflix series coming at the end of October, Akka, with lead Keerthy Suresh. It’s a kick-ass series with a lot of women. And there’s another Tamil film I can’t yet talk about.
tanushree.ghosh@thehindu.co.in