A bilingual film on Rajiv Gandhi's assassination

After making films about the nabbing of Rajiv Gandhi's assassins and forest brigand Veerappan, AMR Ramesh is doing another film that falls in the league of cinema that he loves doing. The filmmaker is, in fact, revisiting an old subject and making Aasphota, a Kannada-Hindi bilingual about how the assassination of the former Prime Minister unfolded. 'I was a student at the film institute when the assassination took place. I was curious about how this operation happened and I rushed to the spot immediately. Back then, Karnataka used to issue smart cards as driving licenses and I flashed that under the pretext of being a press card every time security personnel stopped me. They'd let me through without even looking at the card properly. Coincidentally, the assassins used the same modus operandi, pretending to be media professionals to gain entry into the restricted area close to the former Prime Minister,' says Ramesh.
The filmmaker says that what impressed him most about this case was how the culprits were nabbed in just 60 days. For the director, there was another area of personal interest in the case, as he knew the owners of the house in which the masterminds of the suicide bombing, Sivarasan and Shubha, stayed. Their death led to the subject of his film Cyanide. 'I have since followed this story and have travelled to various places like Sri Lanka, Malaysia and

Singapore

, where people attached to the

LTTE

(The

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam

that was behind the assassination) have given me information. I have also been in touch with various police officers who have been involved with the case and they have shared a lot of trivia and inputs,' reveals Ramesh.