A homecare nurse whose working day stretches from 12 hours to 72 sits at the center of “Selvi,” the first feature from Tamil filmmaker Sailesh Rathnakumar, which premieres in the Busan International Film Festival’s Vision–Asia section.
Anjali Patil plays the title role and produces through her banner Anahat Films. Rathnakumar wrote the screenplay with cinematographer Bargav Sridhar, and Sreekar Prasad edited the film.
Selvi hopes to qualify as a nurse and eventually work in Singapore. When Kavitha, a friend since childhood, attempts suicide, Selvi takes over her shifts on top of her own and spends her days moving between private homes, caring for families who know little about her.
“For someone like Selvi, a crisis doesn’t necessarily arrive as one dramatic event,” Rathnakumar tells Variety. “It develops through a series of working hours, additional responsibilities and small compromises that gradually become unbearable.”
The jump from 12 to 24, 48 and then 72 hours gave the story its shape, he says. As the clock runs, Selvi is always on hand for someone else and has less and less time to be a person in her own right.
The film opens on a beach, with Selvi and her friends flying kites, before moving into domestic interiors where her world narrows. “With the kites, I wanted to show the possibility of looking upwards, of imagining something beyond the immediate circumstances of one’s life,” Rathnakumar says.
The production took its time finding homes that felt lived in and signaled the class of the families inside them. “Selvi can be essential to a family’s everyday life without ever being treated as someone who belongs to it,” he says.
Most of the nurses the director has met came from rural villages to the cities for work. He sees a pecking order within the care sector, where some workers have the training and means to go abroad while others stay stuck in insecure jobs doing intimate, demanding work with little recognition.
Because Sridhar co-wrote the script, the camera plan was baked in from the writing stage. The film never leaves Selvi’s point of view, and the audience learns things only when she does.
Prasad came aboard at the script stage. At their first meeting, the editor flagged scenes that could go without harming the story, which saved the production time and money, Rathnakumar says. The director shot some of them anyway. None made the final cut.
A Prague Film School alumnus, Rathnakumar began his career doing sound and music supervision for veteran Indian editor B. Lenin.
For Patil, Selvi’s habit of putting her own plans on hold struck close to home. After finishing her postgraduate studies in design and direction at the National School of Drama in 2010, she drifted into acting and became one of her family’s main earners. She launched Anahat Films in 2021 intending to write and direct, then spent its first five years producing for other filmmakers.
“Somehow our ambitions grow around circumstances like fungi,” Patil says. “Also, culturally, in Indian society, this behavior is celebrated. Keeping others before oneself to the point of absolute exhaustion. We are surrounded by so many Selvis, men and women alike.”
The shoot couldn’t run in sequence and was organized by location instead, so Patil tracked her own makeup, hair, body and voice continuity across Selvi’s decline, leaning on continuity photos and long rehearsals with the ensemble. “I love being that human thermostat for the film,” she says.
Wearing both hats came at a cost. The final scene was shot on Marina Beach at the end of a rough day, in a window of just a few hours. Patil was preoccupied with whether the production could afford to return if they missed it, and by the last take the light had gone. Rathnakumar and Sridhar told her they had what they needed, but she wasn’t satisfied.
“I remember walking away hurriedly on Marina Beach, sobbing in frustration, hiding from the crew, thinking that, as a producer, I couldn’t even afford to give myself a proper time for the film’s end close-up shot,” Patil says.
The actor, whose credits include “Naa Bangaaru Talli,” “Newton” and “Kaala,” co-produced “The Moogai,” which played Sundance in 2024, and “The Shadowbox,” which played Berlin in 2025. “Selvi” was presented as a work-in-progress at the Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum in March and drew backing from the Red Sea Fund.
International funding, Patil says, means long waits, complicated contracts and co-production treaties, and Indian filmmakers end up chasing the same grants as professionals from wealthier countries. “There is already an undisclosed disparity right there that nobody can talk about,” she says. “And honestly, a lot of times, I feel people still don’t know how to distribute independent Indian films in many parts of the world.”
Rathnakumar points to character-led Tamil films such as “Maharaja,” “Meiyazhagan,” “Vaazhai” and “Lubber Pandhu,” which found audiences alongside star vehicles like “Amaran.” “I think the challenge for independent cinema is not necessarily whether audiences are willing to watch these films, but whether the films can reach them,” he says.
Patil, who has worked in Hindi, Marathi, Telugu and Tamil-language cinema, says Tamil filmmaking has made room for independent voices over the past two to three years, calling it “very, very hopeful for all of us.”
Next up, Rathnakumar is producing Patil’s feature “Average Girl,” the short “Florescence” and Sridhar’s directing effort “Goliath.” He is also developing “Uneventful Death of Mr. Srinivasan,” a comedy about a family whose celebrations turn to mourning when a 70-year-old man dies a day after his Bheema Radha Shanthi ceremony.
Patil, meanwhile, plans to disappear after Busan to work full-time on a speculative sci-fi script she has been developing for six years. “I won’t be postponing my ambitions like Selvi,” she says.