Kshanam

Kshanam
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Ravikanth Perepu
Produced by	PVP cinema
Screenplay by	Adivi Sesh Ravikanth Perepu
Story by	Adivi Sesh
Starring	Adivi Sesh Adah Sharma Anasuya Bharadwaj Vennela Kishore Satyam Rajesh Satyadev Kancharana
Music by	Sricharan Pakala
Cinematography	Shaneil Deo
Edited by	Arjun Shastri Ravikanth Perepu
Production company	PVP cinema
Release dates	26 February 2016 (2016-02-26)
Running time	120 minutes
Country	India
Language	Telugu
Budget	₹1.1 crore (US$160,000)
Box office	₹5 crore (US$740,000)(17 days)

Kshanam (English: Moment) is a 2016 Indian Telugu-language mystery thriller film released worldwide on 26 February 2016. It was directed by Ravikanth Perepu, with Adivi Sesh and Adah Sharma in lead roles and Anasuya Bharadwaj, Vennela Kishore, Satyam Rajesh appearing in supporting roles. Music is by Sricharan Pakala and cinematography by Shaneil Deo. The film opened to critical acclaim & commercial success.The film is inspired from Gone Baby Gone,2007 ; Brick, 2005 and The forgotten, 2004.

Plot

Rishi (Adivi Sesh) is a workaholic working as an investment banker in the San Francisco in United States. After he mismanages a blind date setup by his friend, Rishi is desperate to stay away from relationships. He receives a voice mail left by his ex-girlfriend Shweta (Adah Sharma) who asks him for help but doesn't state what her problem is and asks him to come to India. Rishi leaves for India on the pretext of attending his cousin's marriage.During his journey he recalls his past where he meets Swetha four years ago in Vizag during his education and they both study at same college. Swetha accepts his love proposal but is rejected by her father. They both decide to marry at a temple but during marriage Swetha receives call from her father who is joined in hospital due to heart attack .Swetha then rejects Rishi due to the emotional blackmail by her father. Depressed Rishi leaves to America.Rishi arrives in Hyderabad and checks-in at the Marriott. He goes to meet Shweta at a restaurant, and hires a car from Babu Khan (Vennela Kishore) who is the owner of a rental car service. At the restaurant Rishi learns that Shweta has a daughter named Riya who was kidnapped while on her way to school. The kidnappers injured Shweta and escaped in her car in which she claims her daughter was. She tells Rishi that she had no help from the police or anyone else in finding her. Shweta asks Rishi to help her in finding her daughter to which Rishi agrees, and she says that her husband, Karthik(Satyadev Kancharana) has completely drowned himself in his work to forget about the incident. They both start by looking up the case file in the police station where the police state that the case has been closed due to lack of information and they cannot look up for information that doesn't exist. Rishi then visits the Riya's school from where Riya was kidnapped and talks to the school's principal about the kidnapping. The principal states that there was no kidnapping at all. Rishi reluctantly continues to look for Riya, and follows Bobby, Shweta's brother in law, who is involved with drugs and other illegal activities, after seeing Bobby in a CC camera across from the school the day before Riya was kidnapped. When Rishi follows Bobby, he sees him meet up with some Nigerians, and continues to follow the Nigerians to the location of a secret meeting, where Rishi shockingly sees Babu Khan dealing with them. After a confrontation, Babu Khan admits that he transports drugs from Bobby and his group to other locations and gets paid a vast amount to keep shut about the whole encounter.

After facing many dead ends with no evidence of anything, the police have also closed the case of Riya's kidnapping. Then, a discouraged Rishi gets an idea to place an ad in the newspaper of the details of Riya's kidnapping, as no one seems to even know of it even happening, against Shweta's will. Rishi gets many false phone calls from people looking to get some money out of it, and finally he gets a call from Karthik, Shweta's husband, telling him to please meet him in Karthik's office. Rishi, claiming the identity of a police officer goes to meet him. He is then told that Shweta, after recovering from the week long coma the "kidnappers" had induced by beating her, started to look around for her daughter, Riya, but in fact the couple had no children and this was purely Shweta's imagination. This shocks Rishi and goes around thinking of any evidence of Riya's existence. He realizes that Shweta was only able to produce one passport size photo of Riya and there were no other pictures of Riya in the house, the principal of the school denied ever seeing her, and the CC TV footage of the incident from the house across the street from the site of the crime doesn't show a little girl in the car. Rishi goes to Shweta's house and confronts her about her imaginative lie, where she breaks down and says that no one believes that she has a daughter even though she does. She says that after so many years if she can remember Rishi, how could she forget about the little girl she had with her two months ago. Rishi tries to calm her down and logically prove to her that she doesn't have a daughter, and as he roams around the house, he sees a wall with demarcations of height with dates along the marks, showing that there in fact was a little girl whose height was being measured and Shweta DID have a daughter. Once Rishi realizes this and turns around, he sees that Sweta has jumped off the balcony, committing suicide.

Shweta is shown to be dead, when he walks around realizing what a big mistake he's made, when he is approached by Babu Khan, saying that he had seen her daughter once in Bobby's lair, and he is admitting this truth now as he feels guilty that he could've saved her life. This causes Rishi to continue the investigation, and asks Babu Khan to somehow bring Bobby into the hands of the police, and Babu Khan is able to do so. Bobby goes under interrogation by Ravi Chowdary (Satyam Rajesh), who is new to the Hyderabad police, and starts to punch him, as Bobby started to make snarky remarks at him. This causes ACP Jaya (Anasuya Bharadwaj) to burst into the interrogation room and points a gun at Bobby to get him to tell the truth. She turns away for a second, and Bobby grabs the gun from her and points it at her, which causes her to shoot him as an act of self-defense. Because of this, Rishi now has no leads as to where Riya is. ACP Jaya invites him to her house where he sees pictures of her and her husband, who has died in an accident. Rishi also reveals to her that Shweta and him were college sweethearts, but on the day of their eloped wedding, Shweta gets a call from her dad at the hospital, moments before tying the knot, causing her to marry the groom of her dad's choice. After telling her story, the ACP takes a picture of him on the sly, and Rishi leaves to meet with Babu Khan. Meanwhile, Babu Khan is being attacked by some of Bobby's gang members, and is dead as Rishi arrives. One of the gang members leaves his phone behind, and Rishi sees some SMSs from unknown numbers asking if the murder is done etc., and he discovers a message with his picture saying 'this is Rishi, just to confirm', and the picture is the one that the ACP recently took of him.

Rishi shockingly realizes that the ACP wants to kill him, and realizes that she may be behind the kidnapping. He runs around the slums to find ACP Jaya's maid and asks her, at gunpoint, where the ACP is, to which she replies frightened, saying she is at the farmhouse. Rishi runs to the farmhouse and tries to secretly search the parameters of the farmhouse, when he feels a gun at his head, the gun being held by the ACP pointing from behind. The ACP takes him inside the house. He starts to yell, asking her what she did to Riya when she tells him to shut up as Riya is sleeping upstairs. Rishi, shocked, asks her why she would do such a thing, when she reveals that Riya is better off with the ACP because otherwise she would've been killed by the orders of Karthik. She continues saying that one day she went to Bobby's lair to get two boxes of Drugs and showed up early, when she heard a muffled scream from inside and found Riya who was blindfolded. As the ACP undid the blindfold, Riya hugged her and called her mother, which struck an emotional nerve for the ACP who decided to keep her, as her husband and her were planning on naming their future daughter Riya. The ACP then strung together a meticulous plan to keep Riya for herself. As Karthik already wanted to get rid of Riya, ACP convinces him to give away Riya as a bribe for cancelling out his felonies, and told him to tell everyone that Riya had died. Since Shweta was in a coma, they planned for Karthik to tell all of their friends, family and anyone who knew of Riya's existence to behave as if Riya was never real, under the pretense that it would cause Shweta emotional damage if she found out that her daughter was "dead". Karthik also took away any pictures of Riya from their home and replaced any evidence that Riya was real. Once Shweta came out of the coma, Karthik acted as if they had never had a daughter. Though the ACP had wanted to kill off Shweta when she was in a coma herself, Karthik wanted to keep her alive in this horrible condition due to his sadistic nature. The ACP reveals that Shweta would cry for days at a time and Karthik would happily report this to her. Shocked at this information, Rishi asks her why Karthik had wanted to kill Riya and ACP answers it is because Riya isn't Karthik's child. At this time, Chowdary, and the rest of the police force enter and shoot the ACP dead, as it turns out Rishi had a phone call with Ravi the entire time so he could hear the revelations. Injured Rishi is joined in the hospital and during the Ravi's interrogation Karthik reveals that Riya is not born to him but someone else. Karthik comes to know this by his medical reports that he is a sterile and cannot produce children. After recovery Ravi reveals to Rishi that Riya is born to him. Then rishi recalls two days before swetha's marriage to karthik, Swetha met rishi to tell him she can't marry him. To fulfill her father's last wish, she agreed to marry Karthik but they both made love before she left. Rishi becomes happy by thinking that he came from a long place in search of his daughter which he thinks that it is destiny and his daughter has same resemblances and features of him. The movie ends with Rishi meeting his daughter for the first time.

Cast

• Adivi Sesh as Rishi
• Adah Sharma as Swetha
• Anasuya Bharadwaj as ACP Jaya Bharadwaj
• Satyadev Kancharana as Karthik
• Amit Sachdev as Commissioner Lucknow
• Vennela Kishore as Babu Khan
• Satyam Rajesh as Ravi Chowdary
• Ravi Varma as Bobby
• Uma Akkineni

Production

The film's concept was inspired by a small incident in actor and filmmaker Adivi Sesh's life when he felt creepy after dropping a four-year-old girl and her friends at a school in Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad.^[1] Concerned about the girl's safety, Sesh wanted to make a thriller film with the missing of a three-year-old being the backdrop.^[2] Prasad V Potluri of PVP Cinema agreed to bankroll the film and Sesh's friend Ravikanth Perepu was chosen to direct the film; it marked the latter's debut in Telugu cinema.^[3] Sesh and Perepu worked on the screenplay for ten months. Pre-production phase began three months after the scripting work commenced. Sesh and Perepu chose to work with a low budget to make the project a feasible one, considering the genre's appeal.^[3] The film's crew consisted of 20 members; two of Perepu's twelfth grade friends were the associate directors.^[3]

While writing the script, Sesh and Perepu discussed possibilities for every situation and discarded the first one as it would be a predictable one.^[3] Shaneil Deo was the film's director of photography. Sricharan Pakala composed the film's soundtrack and score. Perepu edited the film with Arjun Shastri;^[4] Sesh and the associate directors did involve in the process.^[3] Sesh played Rishi, an investment banker who searches for his ex-girlfriend's missing child on her request.^[1][2] He stated that Rishi was modelled on his real self in terms of sensibilities except for the fact that the character is an alcoholic.^[5]

Release and Reception

Kshanam movie's theatrical trailer is released on February 10, 2016 which increased expectations and curiosity among audience.Kshanam was released on 26 February 2016 across Telangana and Andhra Pradesh and received critical acclaim and received positive response from the first show.^[6][7] It was rated 3.25 by Idlebrain.com^[8] and The Hindu gave it 4 stars.^[9]

Box office

In 10 days since its release, Kshanam grossed about ₹ 4.8 crores at the Telugu (AP and Telangana) Box office.^[10] It collected $65,679 (₹ 44.83 lakh) from 27 screens at the US box office in the first weekend.^[11] In its second weekend, it collected $28,889 from 20 screens at the US box office and its 10-day total US collection stands at $111,037 (₹ 74.68 lakh).^[12]

References

External links

• Kshanam at the Internet Movie Database