Krishna DK interview: On taking ‘The Family Man’ to Northeast and self-censorship
(Originally published in The Hindu on December 18, 2023)
The golden run of filmmaker duo Raj & DK and writer Suman Kumar with The Family Man, Farzi, and Guns & Gulaabs represents the zeitgeist of the pan-Indian cinema movement more than even most pan-Indian features. Hailing from Andhra Pradesh, Raj & DK teamed up with Suman, a Bangalorean now awaiting the release of his debut feature film in Tamil, to create The Family Man, headlined by the Bihar-born Delhiite Manoj Bajpayee. Because each season of the show deals with a political issue concerning a specific region of the country, actors from other film industries organically find their way into the cast; this, of course, is a breather from makers casting regional stars simply to pander to the ‘pan-India’ tag. The story flowing and connecting other parts of the country also makes it more attractive as a project, especially at a time when film industries other than Bollywood are yet to find faith in long-format storytelling on streaming platforms.
On Saturday, at the recently concluded 8th edition of the Brahmaputra Valley Film Festival in Guwahati, Assam, Krishna DK participated in a masterclass on the art of telling stories through the longer format and, along with Suman, in a discussion titled ‘Mastering the Evolving Landscape of Web Series’. With the upcoming third season of The Family Man moving the story to the region, the filmmaker will be travelling more and more to the Northeast, and he does sound excited. “We are now in development, and over the next few months, we will come here, interact with people, explore the culture and incorporate them back into our script,” says DK, in this conversation with us at the film festival.
Excerpts:
What stood out about the first two seasons of ‘The Family Man’ is the effort to flesh out both sides of an insurgency. With the story now moving to the Northeast, can we expect the same balance in writing?
The idea of The Family Man has always been to have a balanced approach to everything without necessarily taking sides. There’s a clear demarcation between a protagonist and an antagonist in our stories, but there is a…
Read the full interview here: