For techie-cum-filmmaker Samyuktha Vijayan, the screening of her maiden film ‘Neela Nira Sooriyan’ at the 54th edition of the prestigious International Film Festival of India next Sunday (Nov 26) is not about her work getting recognized or she receiving accolades. She intends to break stereotypes, instead.
Sometime during the pandemic when Samyuktha decided to direct and act in a movie about a male transitioning into a female in a semi-urban town in western Tamil Nadu in the most realistic manner possible, her objective was to break all those cliche that male actors portraying transgenders have fed moviegoers over the decades. “So many films have come out with transgender characters but I’ve not yet seen the nuance of being a transgender told by anyone in a realistic manner,” she tells the Ground Zero Post over a Zoom call from her residence in the United States. “That’s exactly what I’ve attempted in this film,” she says.
“So many films have come out with transgender characters but I’ve not yet seen the nuance of being a transgender told by anyone in a realistic manner.”
Samyuktha Vijayan
Growing up as Santosh Vijayan in picturesque Pollachi, Samyuktha completed graduation in engineering at the PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore and joined the IT industry like most of her classmates. After landing a job with Amazon, she travelled the world as a successful IT professional before settling down in Seattle, Washington. “I made the decision in Seattle. Once I made up my mind, the process of transition was so simple. On a Friday, I left work as Santosh and returned to office on Monday as Samyuktha. Period. My colleagues at work as well as my friends did not even notice a difference. At least, that’s how they made me feel about the process,” she recalls.
Since then, Samyuktha had been wondering about all that she would have had to go through if that transformation took place back home in India. And that thought kept rebounding in her head again and again until it became a full-fledged script and later turned into the feature film to be screened in Goa next week.
As a successful transgender woman in the IT industry, Samyuktha had received substantial media attention when she joined Swiggy as its first transgender employee and tried to help others like her find well-paying jobs. She has also tried her hand at running a boutique specializing in high-end wedding wear rentals. “Around this period, I came in touch with Chennai-based producer Mala Manian who wanted to make a movie based on the life of a transgender woman. Bu I wasn’t too impressed with the script as I felt it was not a true portrayal of what I actually went through. So, I decided to do it myself.”
After several rewrites and scouting for right artistes and technicians, the tech entrepreneur invested a major chunk of her savings in the film and shot it over just 25 days in Pollachi and surrounding areas during November 2022.
Locked up somewhere in Seoul, South Korea during the COVID pandemic, Samyuktha began working on the script for ‘Blue Sunshine’ based on the experience of an acquaintance, a school teacher from Pollachi, who also went through a similar transition in her hometown. After several rewrites and scouting for right artistes and technicians, the tech entrepreneur invested a major chunk of her savings in the film and shot it over just 25 days in Pollachi and surrounding areas in November 2022. Except for a few professional actors, most of the cast were selected from surrounding areas to keep the film as grounded to reality as possible.
The movie premiered at the Tasveer Film Festival in Seattle and has also been selected at the Kolkata International Film Festival besides the IFFI. Samyuktha intends to take her Blue Sunshine to a few more festivals before trying for a theatrical release in TN and later pitch it for the OTT platforms.