On the evening of November 18, the foyer of Cine Lounge Theater in Fremont was adorned with a red carpet for the premiere of Twisted Tales, a feature-length Telugu film produced in the Bay Area, and Dallas, Texas. Released under the banner of Hyderabad-based production company Wrapped Candy Films, the film is an anthology of four 30-minute shorts, a labor of love for the 60 people who made up the cast and crew of this film.
And they’re just getting started.
Growing a desi film community from scratch
The Twisted Tales premiere was the culmination of a process that started during the pandemic, when Uday Govindarajula, an immigrant tech worker from India decided to realize his passion for film-making and acting. He linked up with others in his network interested in film-making and started making short films.
“I started with four to five people here in the Bay Area, but right now we are at 120 people and counting,” said Govindarajula, the executive producer of Twisted Tales, who also wrote and starred in one of the four short films. “Being a local filmmaker, we want to promote our South Asian films here in the US as well.”
As more people joined in, Govindarajula tied up with like-minded Indian filmmakers in Dallas and started work on a feature-length anthology Twisted Tales. More than 120 people auditioned to work on or act in the film, another indicator of the growing appetite for making Telugu films in the United States.
Most of the artists working in the film have full-time jobs that they juggled throughout the production. “Some of us spent hours after work to write the story, to have meetings, to discuss about the story, for location scouting,” said Gowthami Bojja, a Bay Area-based actor who plays a significant role in one of the short films. “We even took leave from work to match shooting schedules,” she said.
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Twist in the Tale
As for the film, the thread that unites all four shorts is that each of them plays out like suspenseful short stories that pack a punch with their surprise ending.
For instance, in the first short “The Secret Box”, directed by director duo Sourabh Burgula and Nikhil Bharadwaj Vanamamalai, a newlywed woman wonders what’s inside a secret box that her husband keeps locked in their cupboard.
In Sujay Putchala’s “Serendipity,” an author struggles with writer’s block but finds that her book is writing itself.
Showrunner Pavan Atukuri directed “Impostor,” in which a woman seeks the help of a private investigator when she suspects that an impostor has taken the place of her husband. Atukuri also directed “Blind Spot”, in which Govindarajula plays a cop trying to get to the bottom of a perplexing double homicide.
“I can’t say anything about my role,” said actor Sindhura Muvva who plays the female lead in “Blind Spot”. “If I say anything, it’ll reveal something or the other about the twist!”
An Industry Coming Into Its Own
Both scheduled screenings sold out, and Govindarajula believes that this might be a turning point for his motley group of Bay Area and U.S.-based filmmakers. “There’s way too many untapped stories here,” he said. “We thought releasing the film here in the Bay Area would make sense because the audience understands the sensibilities of Indian cinema, and we’re really happy with the response.”
While the cast and crew are predominantly Indian-American, their ethos is to collaborate with like-minded artists from other communities in the U.S. and to eventually bring homegrown Tenglish (a combination of Telugu and English) films into the mainstream.
For Carlos Martin and Cecil Ogamba, this was their first time working on an Indian-American production, and they hope to work in more Bay Area Telugu productions in the future.
“I play a doctor [in “Blind Spot”] and I help out some of the main characters in the film, and even though it’s not a major role, it’s truly an honor to be a part of this film,” said Ogamba, a San Jose resident of Nigerian origin. “I hope this film succeeds, I hope it goes to the next level, and I hope that we get to reap the benefits of its success!”
Apart from scoping out distribution channels for Twisted Tales, Govindarajula is eager to jump into post-production for Mentor Jeevi, a film about AI in which he has played a small part. Two other projects titled Boundaries and Mr. Premikudu are in the audition and ideation stages. He thanked the Bay Area Indian community for their support and appealed to audiences to invest time and money to support independently produced Indian films.
“It is spreading all over the country right now,” he said. “It is an industry of its own now!”