Kaantha

Set in 1950s Madras, this Tamil period crime thriller follows a celebrated film director, Ayya, whose relationship with the actor he mentored into stardom, Mahadevan, grows increasingly bitter during the making of a movie based on Ayya's own mother. As Mahadevan asserts creative control over the production and grows close to the film's leading lady, tensions between the two men escalate into open hostility, eventually drawing in a police investigation. The story is a fictionalized account inspired by the life of the real-life Tamil cinema icon M. K. Thyagaraja Bhagavathar.

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