Ekam web series: Tradition and Identity co-director Sanal Aman has a personal favourite and it is…

The Malik actor’s first direction venture is Ekam, the Kannada web series that is now available to stream.

Sanal Aman has co-directed two of the 7 stories in Ekam

A few years ago, Malayalam actor Sanal Aman met Ekam showrunner Sandeep PS enroute to Bhutan where they were to conduct a workshop on filmmaking and acting. “We got to know each other and our respective working styles during this workshop, which lasted more than a week. After that, we had occasional contact on social media, until the pandemic, when I was awaiting the release of my first commercial film Malik, and was stuck in a flat in Kochi (lockdown). This was a time when I did not know if the film would release or if any of us would ever get to do any work again. As an actor, you are dependent on filmmakers whether to make or break your career and the realization that I needed to create and tell my own stories struck me,” says Sanal.

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The actor-filmmaker started a routine for himself to learn more about writing for films and directing too. “I had started writing a story, when Sandeep called me out of the blue. He told me that his team was working on a web series called Ekam and asked if I’d be up to co-directing a couple of the stories they’d selected. Since I was already contemplating a shift to filmmaking, this offer came at the right time, I must say. I took my bike and headed from Kochi to my hometown Kannur, spent a week there and then took off to Manipal, where the show was being shot,” he tells us.

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Tapping into Sanal's expertise for Ekam

Once he joined the team, Sanal realized that most of the crew members were from a particular film school and specialized in the more technical aspects of filmmaking. “What they lacked was an actor’s input or someone who could deal with actors, and how to direct them. They needed someone to handle this aspect and that’s where I came in handy. It was a little surprising, because I don’t have a background in direction, but they had confidence in me that I could conduct workshops for the newbie actors on the cast, for instance,” he adds.

Sanal was given two stories to direct along with Swaroop Elamon – Tradition and Identity – and even played a role in the latter. “Although the stories were in place and a basic screenplay too, everything else, including scene division, casting, etc. had to be taken care of. It was an experience that was about learnings and enjoying the process too. Here I was, co-directing with someone I’d never met before and we had to figure out a way to be in sync and take the project forward. This was really an enriching experience. I was working in a region that I was not familiar with, and a language I had no clue about, with a crew I had just met – fulfilling the task at hand despite these challenges gave me a lot of confidence,” he says.

Why did they chose make Identity in Malayalam, though? “The border areas, for instance, have heavy influence of Malayalam, Tulu and Kannada. A Malayali can survive in Mangaluru speaking in Malayalam. That’s the context in this story. Only the protagonist is Malayali and everyone around him speaks Kannada. In fact, both Tradition and Identity were written by a Malayali and not based on the geography of Karavali. We adapted it accordingly,” explains Sanal.

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Tradition, says the actor-filmmaker, is his personal favourite. “I loved it when I read it; it’s so surreal. It follows a few men hurriedly walking somewhere, who, as it turns out, are on their way to conduct the funeral ceremonies of someone within the family. But then they figure out that one of the members of the party that was hurrying along is the man who’s been presumed dead. How they resolve this is what the story is about,” says Sanal.

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