Indrans and Sharafudeen come together in a family story helmed by Shafi

The coming together of Indrans, Sharafudeen and director Shafi would immediately make audiences think, ‘light-hearted entertainer’, and Anandam Paramanandam looks like it will fall in that genre. But Shafi tells us there is more to the film, which had its first look released recently. “It is set in a village and is a family subject told with a slight touch of humour. It is a genre that I haven’t done before; not an out-and-out comedy, but we look at some family situations in an entertaining manner.”

Indrans plays a retired postman, who has decided to enjoy his post retired life drinking all day at the toddy shop with friends, and Sharafudeen too, is someone who has an alcohol problem. “The title comes from the two main characters asking each other what drinking gives them, and one says Anandam and the other says Paramanandham. But amidst this happiness and ecstasy that they enjoy, what do their families go through is what the story attempts to look at,” says Shafi, whose last film was Children’s Park.

The film also has Anagha Narayanan of Thinkalazhcha Nishchayam fame, Aju Varghese and Baiju Santosh. Music is by Shaan Rahman with lyrics by Manu Manjith

Speaking about music and films in the Malayalam industry seeing a change in the past few years, Shafi says, “We have a lot of good new-gen films, but it is still the mass films that seem to send the cash registers ringing. This is probably one of the smaller films that I have done, but the story which has a novelty, scripted by M Sindhuraj, interested me enough to want to make it.”