PremiumExclusive! Akhil Anilkumar on Freedom Fight: Conceiving Rajisha’s Geethu wasn’t tough as she’s all around us
The filmmaker talks about the protagonist in his segment Geethu Unchained from the anthology, which is currently streaming Sony LIV
Last Updated: 06.29 AM, Feb 11, 2022
February 11 is a special day for director Akhil Anilkumar. The filmmaker has been anxiously waiting for the feedback of two of his ventures – Geethu Unchained from Freedom Fight and Archana 31 Not Out – for a week now, and he has been getting the initial responses for the former after it dropped on Sony LIV earlier today.
His segment Geethu Unchained has Rajisha Vijayan in the lead and focuses on the thoughts of a girl after she has been asked out by her colleague. Through that episode, it also shows the various stereotypes that girls have to encounter from the family and public, and how she finds her voice while navigating through these.
Ask Akhil how he landed on the idea of Geethu Unchained and he says, “For my second short film after Devika Plus 2 Biology, I got this thread centred on the first night of a wedding. But that idea didn’t work for me. It had this opening scene, where the guy asks the girl if she likes him and she mulls over the different scenarios about what happens if she says she likes him and she doesn’t. The short film ends when she says that she wants to think about it and leaves. This was the two-minute short film I had in mind – about how a girl contemplates so much and still says she wants more time to think about it. I have heard from a friend that a girl overthinks when a boy asks her if she likes him.”
The filmmakers says that while he had the idea years ago, he only began to work on it last year as he was busy with his feature film debut Archana 31 Not Out, starring Aishwarya Lekshmi . “But when I contracted COVID-19, I wrote a lot of scripts. Geethu Unchained was the final one which I wanted to develop into a movie,” he says.
The segment is peppered with instances that happen in every household. “For instance, if my sister chooses a dull-coloured dress, my mother would blast her for wearing ‘shabby’ clothes. In her mind, only vibrant-coloured clothes are new. So, there are so many people like Geethu that I have seen,” he says.
Further elaborating on how he fleshed out the character, Akhil says, “For instance, if a girl says she doesn’t like a guy, the boy will tell his friends, ‘Aval techu’. But if the case is reversed, the guys would say, ‘Forget about her’. At one point even I have said that. In fact, the character Rajesh (essayed by Renjith Shekhar Nair) is like me. I am always concerned about what others would say. That’s why it wasn’t tough to create Geethu’s character,” Akhil concludes.