Srinidhi Bengaluru recalls being in a local "Xerox" shop, taking printouts while writing his upcoming feature film Video, when an idea struck. Forget paper, what if human beings could be duplicated? "I narrated just a line of this pitch to Zee5, and they got excited," the filmmaker tells The Hollywood Reporter India. Bengaluru's next project is Jerax, a 6-episode comedy that's out on Zee5 this week.
The show, which unfolds in the early 1990s, is set in the fictional town of Rayadurga — a name that might be familiar to fans of the director's breakout time-travel film Blink (2024). The show will have minor elements from Blink, including the town newspaper. "I initially envisioned the show to be a mind-bending crime thriller, on the lines of my previous work," he shares. But somewhere along the way, it took the shape of a quirky comedy of errors, which the filmmaker alludes to his love for Ramesh Aravind's 1997 Kannada comedy Ulta Palta. "In Jerax,I have given this superpower to a Xerox shop owner who hasn't even passed his fourth grade. My idea was to explore these powers in a person with these limitations."
The director's interest in the supernatural is evident in his body of work, which includes his upcoming found-footage film Video. Bengaluru attributes this obsession to his theatre background. "I am a theatre artist. There are plays like 'Siri Sampige' and 'Nagamandala', which involve human beings turning into snakes, which I enjoy watching." Bengaluru was trained by popular playwright Suresh Anagalli, who also had a prominent role in Blink.
While Blink had a tough start — the film took about three years to be released in the theatres — it took off incrementally through strong word of mouth. "The film was released in just 8 screens. The producer had to distribute the film himself, as we didn't get anyone else to distribute it. We would call a lot of our theatre friends to the screen to show our occupancy to multiplexes. But slowly the audience came, and our friends didn't have space to sit," he recalls with a laugh.
The success of Blink gave the filmmaker more opportunities, but it also gave him an edge: "As you know, it is slow, as it is with the Kannada film industry. But I'm getting to do what I like to do." The filmmaker is expanding on his love for fantasy with Video, which is currently in post-production stages. "A group of YouTubers go to a haunted house once they hit a million subscribers to see if they can stay there for a whole night. You will be surprised in the end." Unlike classics like The Blair Witch Project (1999), the film is a digital recreation of home footage. GoPros, Insta 360 and iPhones replace film cameras.
His career in the movies aside, the young director continues to discuss cinema on his social media, forging a community of Kannada film lovers. "When I started my YouTube page a few years back, I saw a lot of representation from Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam on YouTube, exploring great films from their industries. But there was limited documentation of great Kannada cinema. The parallel movement began earlier in Kannada cinema. There was a lull in the middle. But we will kickstart and come back."