Ahead of 'Kuberaa', Every Sekhar Kammula Film, Ranked

Sekhar Kammula’s cinema often feels like a brisk cup of coffee on drizzly mornings (like the bottomless brewed pots Rupa and Anand bond over in his delicate 2004 romance Anand). But his cinema can also run a sharp jolt through you (In Leader’s climax, an elderly man from the lowered caste resists a car ride from the CM and prefers to take the bus instead: “It’s safer,” he utters, eyes painfully recalling his daughter’s injustice at the hands of a politician).

Kammula’s brand of films tends to maintain a sense of realism even if his characters are deeply unusual in their thinking. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter India, Kammula explained how he aspires to reflect the middle-of-the-road cinema that Hrishikesh Mukherjee established in the seventies, but with a hint of dreaminess — perhaps the exact kind of films the action-fatigued Telugu audiences are starving. He's excited by the story of a young, ordinary middle-class woman who calls off her wedding simply because she's denied the right to choose her sari. On the same plane, he’s also intrigued by a man who fools a white man to get a job in the US, but ultimately changes his plans at the last minute to open a small business in India. 

Kammula writes everyday stories with extraordinary characters — men and women who operate with a heavy understanding of agency. Ahead of his tenth feature, Dhanush and Nagarjuna’s Kuberaa, here’s a very subjective attempt at ranking his films. 

9. Life is Beautiful

Life Is Beautiful has all the ingredients of a Kammula film: the friends-like-family subplot, women who beat the men in confidently professing their love, and characters who rebuild life after tragedies. But the film doesn’t have the straight-shooting vision that Kammula always brings to his work. We instead have strange sequences of men ogling at women — Anjala Zaveri’s Maya and Shreya Saran’s Paddu are unfortunately reduced to stereotypes — dancing in the rain. A family tragedy is treated with such a saccharine, heavy hand. The film, however, did launch now-popular actors Naveen Polishetty and Vijay Deverakonda, even if it was through hackneyed antagonists. 

8. Anaamika

A remake of Sujoy Ghosh’s incredibly original Kahaani (2012), Anaamika brings in its own revisions in Kammula’s iteration. But perhaps the biggest change that the filmmaker brings to this missing person thriller is passing over the complex study of motherhood, a running theme in Kahaani. Unlike Vidya Bagchi, Anaamika (Nayanthara) isn’t a grieving mother looking for answers. The film instead focuses on her strength as a righteous woman, who will go to any lengths to make sure justice is served, even if it means harming her own. This large update derails the story, stripping it of the tact and intrigue that skilfully draped the original source. Kammula’s voice manages to come out in passing, especially in a scene that brilliantly lays out the effects of islamophobia on Muslims — in a sharp sequence, an Imam refuses to let the children in his madrassa be questioned by the police without a warrant: “This is the problem with our country. Everyone thinks mosques and madrassas train terrorists…I will not let you insult them.” 

7. Happy Days

We hold on to certain films for its ability to stand the test of time and few others for the way it once made us feel. Happy Days happily falls into the latter category, instantly evoking memories of a simple time. The film explores the kind of friendships you make when you’re at your raw, unbridled self, a side that college often brings out in people. Every uncomfortable emotion rears its ugly head among the gang of friends (the film gave Tamannaah her breakout role) as they navigate love, loss and second chances. While not all love stories have aged well (one isn’t sure how a crass comment on a woman’s skin tone will be perceived today), there is a particular track that manages to stay fresh. Ever since Rajesh and Appu’s story begins, you’re instantly dreading and foreseeing an elaborate makeover for the pixie-haired tomboy, just for Rajesh to realise his love. But Kammula refrains from going there, and we appreciate it.  

6. Love Story

With Love Story, Kammula is back to doing what he does best: peculiar but heartfelt romances. But this is also a film where he goes beyond the purview of familiarity to give us a romance with an external conflict. The film, which follows the romance between Revanth (Naga Chaitanya) and Mounika (Sai Pallavi), two people who delightfully bond over their love for dancing, sneaks in some perceptive complexities about intercaste romances. There perhaps comes a time in every relationship where one discovers a side to their partner they never knew existed. Love Story depicts this intricacy in a brilliant scene where Mounika lets out a casteist remark in anger. But not all subplots in the film are treated with this much depth, something that the complex subject deserved. 

5. Dollar Dreams

In Dollar Dreams, Kammula is confronted with the biggest, most relevant question for Indian software engineers: to take the plane or not? The film takes a riveting and almost documentarian approach to explore the lives of a gang of friends in Hyderabad, who are torn between leaving for the US and staying back. Set bang in the middle of the IT boom of the 90s, Dollar Dreams expertly looks at the consequences of the Indian migration to the US, especially on elderly parents and friends. Anish Kuruvilla particularly shines as Srinu, who is struggling to choose between the promise of a new life and making peace with the supposed “mediocrity” of being home. When someone asks him why he wants to stay back here (India), Srinu is bewildered by the question: “I was born here for god’s sake,” he barks, uttering one of the best lines in the film. 

4. Godavari

Meant to be a completely immersive joyride, Godavari is aptly set against the backdrop of a charming river cruise from Rajamundry to Bhadrachalam, a popular tourist activity in Andhra Pradesh. And the lives of several people — this includes a delightful track involving a balloon seller and his dog, voiced by Kammula himself — cross wires. Small acts of kindness bring a motley group of tourists together, especially Sita (Kamalinee Mukherjee) and Ram (Sumanth), who struggle to contain their attraction for each other. After Anand, Mukherjee yet again gets to play a determined young woman, who does romance on her terms. 

3. Fidaa

Bhanumati from Fidaa is perhaps a collective representation of the Sekhar Kammula heroine. Sai Pallavi is lustrous in the role, making way for the antithesis of the “loosu ponnu” trope in films from the south. She, of course, sings, dances, bawls and can typically be put into the “chirpy” heroine bracket, if not for Kammula’s light hand in fleshing out her character. She flirts like she fights, and veils her love for the NRI Varun with taunts. And the film lets her be. But where Fidaa really succeeds is by giving voice to the collective angst of several married women: why can’t a man move for a woman? Romance aside, the film has such a lovely track involving a single father and his daughters. Whoever can forget the scene where a slight tugging of the sari (tied to the groom’s dhoti as part of certain Hindu wedding traditions) makes a new bride (Bhanumati’s sister) realise it’s time to bid farewell to dad. 

2. Leader

Most popular filmmakers have at least one political film in their repertoire, and Leader is Kammula’s. And what a film to touch base in the genre with. The film has all the markers of a commercial social drama done right. When the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh is suddenly murdered, he lets out his last wish seconds before death: his righteous NRI son Arjun (Rana Daggubati) must succeed him. We’ve seen this type of plot play out in many films before — recently, Shankar’s Game Changer (2025). But Leader doesn’t take the easy way out. It crafts a methodical series of events to tell a story as old as the hills. And it doesn’t shy away from discussing the effects of caste discrimination, registering Dalit anger against upper caste politicians with refreshing nuance. 

1. Anand

A woman calls off her wedding after being denied the chance to wear her mum’s sari: Anand will go down in Kammula’s filmography as having the coolest, most remarkable brief. Rupa (Kamalinee Mukherjee) is an orphan who lost her parents and her brother to an unfortunate DUI by another car driver. What if the son of her parents’ “killer” were to serendipitously fall in love with her? This gives Anand a delightful philosophical touch. The film is a writing exercise in the Show, Don't Tell technique, giving Rupa an exhaustive but moving portrait. Once a loudmouthed girl, Rupa slowly breaks out of her shell when Anand (Raja) enters her life. Rupa, who preemptively walks out of a toxic marriage, has come to be a feminist icon among admirers of the film. But Anand must also be credited for writing a gentle but completely besotted leading man, who forgets a career in the US for his love (we're certainly noticing a pattern here).