Age-gap romances have been the flavour of the season, with Suriya and Mamitha Baiju's Vishwanath and Sons, Nivin Pauly and Mamitha's Bethlehem Kudumba Unit, and Nayanthara and Kavin's Hi hitting theatres consecutively. Adding to this list of theatrical releases is AK Srikanth's A Song for Eresha, which is now out on Apple TV on a rent or buy basis. Based on Srikanth’s own debut novel, the film follows the head of a dance institution (Bharatnatyam danseuse Savitha Sastry) who develops a romantic interest in her new disciple (Mayurakshi Sen), making her confront the nuances of a relationship that society consider taboo but she grapples with. Unlike the other romances, A Song for Eresha also has a Mahabharata connection to it, and it raises pertinent questions about same-sex romance, ambition, and societal prejudice. In a recent interview with Cinema Express, director AK Srikanth discusses the film's themes, age-gap romance, Mahabharata integration, and future projects.
The film deals with an age-gap romance, a trending plot element in the South. Why do you think we haven't explored it much in films?
Age gaps have always existed in Indian cinema. We simply chose not to notice them, particularly when the man was older. The question is why these relationships have not been explored more often, especially when the woman is older.
Part of the reason may be that Indian cinema has traditionally been shaped by patriarchal ideas about romance, desirability, and marriage. Older men with younger women were treated as conventional, even aspirational, while older women with younger men were often viewed as unusual, comic, or socially threatening. As a result, the age difference was rarely examined as a meaningful part of the relationship.
What is interesting now is that the age gap itself is becoming part of the story. People separated by a generation may bring very different experiences and expectations to a relationship. In A Song for Eresha, there is the added complication that one is the other’s teacher, and the love is one-sided.
But if I were to look at it less cynically, when someone genuinely falls in love, is age really the first thing they think about? Probably not. Love has never been particularly respectful of the boundaries we create for it. Perhaps that is what makes these relationships worth exploring in the first place.
Recently, there has been this discussion that such cinema won't work if it involves the romance between an older woman and a younger man...
I’m not sure we have seen enough such films to conclude that audiences will not accept them. For decades, the older-man, younger-woman pairing has been so commonplace that we barely notice it. The reverse has had far fewer opportunities to become equally familiar.
Ultimately, I think audiences respond to people rather than equations. If they believe the attraction, the affection and the emotional stakes between two characters, the age difference becomes one aspect of the relationship rather than the reason to reject it.
Perhaps it is less a question of whether audiences are ready, and more a question of whether we have given them enough stories to find out.
Why did you choose to film this story in English and not in regional languages?
The story is set in an institute where students come from across India, so English naturally felt like the common language. It didn’t feel like something we imposed on the film. At the same time, it makes the film accessible to audiences across India and outside the country. But that doesn’t make the world feel generic or disconnected from its cultural context. That context comes through in the characters, their relationships, their pasts, their ambitions and the social world they belong to. The way they speak, behave and relate to one another is shaped by that environment.
Beyond age-gap, the film tackles complex feelings between the two leads integrated into the Mahabharata. The lines between performance and reality blur, and there is a performance within the performance. Which was the most challenging aspect of the film for you?
The most challenging aspect was drawing the parallel with the Mahabharata in a way that felt organic rather than manipulative or contrived. The film moves between performance and reality, with a performance unfolding within the larger performance, so those layers had to speak to one another without making the connection feel overly deliberate.
The emotional complexity between the two leads also had to remain grounded in their individual experiences, rather than being reduced to a symbolic retelling. The Mahabharata provides a rich framework, but the characters still needed to feel like real people with their own desires, conflicts and uncertainties. Finding the balance between those mythological echoes and the intimate, contemporary world of the film was probably the most challenging part.
I also was keen the whole denouement felt natural and real, and not ‘cinematic’ - and that restraint which I was attempting proved more difficult than I would have imagined.
If you could direct the film all over again, would you keep it the same or make some tweaks?
I don’t think I would change anything. Of course, when you watch something you made after a gap, there are always moments when you think, perhaps I could have done this differently, or held that shot a little longer. I suppose that temptation never really goes away.
But A Song for Eresha belongs to a particular time in my life and to the person I was when I made it. I like the fact that it has a certain rawness. Some choices were carefully thought through, others were completely instinctive, and I wouldn’t want to go back now, with the benefit of hindsight, and make everything too perfect.
There are rough edges, certainly, but they are mine. And perhaps that is why I remain fond of them. The film feels alive to me in a way that something more polished may not have. I would rather leave it exactly where it is.
The film explores what one's true calling is. What is yours: writing or cinema?
I think, if I had to choose a true calling, it would simply be storytelling. I’ve been making up stories in my head for as long as I can remember, long before I knew what I wanted to do with them. That instinct has probably remained the one constant through everything I’ve done.
Writing and cinema to me are just two different ways in which those stories find their way out. I don’t really feel the need to choose between them. Some stories arrive as images, people and places, and you know instinctively that they belong on screen. Others feel more private and seem to want the space that a book gives them. I’m quite happy to let the story make that decision for me.
And once in a blue moon, you get lucky and find something that belongs naturally to both. A Song for Eresha was one of those.
Was the intention to film your own novel a part of a strategy to bring in audiences to your novel?
Actually, no. The film premiered in Europe on the very same day that the book was released worldwide, so in a sense they came into the world together. The American and Indian releases of the film happened later, by which time the book was already out.
For me, they were always two different ways of looking at the same story. The film stays very tightly embedded around the two central characters and their relationship. The book gave me the freedom to step outside them and build the world that made them who they are. I created the fictional town of Azhagankarai for the novel, loosely inspired by the mangrove marshlands of Muthupet, and that town almost became a character in itself. Its people, its histories, its prejudices and its peculiarities all shape the lives of these two women.
So the novel wasn’t intended to bring an audience to the film, or the other way around. I wanted each to offer something the other couldn’t.
It's interesting how the film integrates the art form of Bharathanatyam into the story. We are in the age of AI, and such art forms are considered niche and not mainstream. Do you think they will remain so, unaffected by innovations such as AI?
I would like to believe that art forms such as Bharatanatyam will continue to have their own place, irrespective of how technology evolves. It has survived and adapted through centuries of social and cultural change, and perhaps AI is simply another change it will learn to coexist with.
What I find particularly beautiful about an art form like Bharatanatyam is that it carries years of learning, discipline, interpretation and personal experience. Technology may increasingly be able to reproduce aspects of its form, but the relationship between a dancer and the art is something far more personal.
I’m also not sure that being niche is necessarily a disadvantage. Not everything needs to become mainstream to remain relevant. In A Song for Eresha, Bharatanatyam is part of the world these characters inhabit. It shapes their relationships and their choices, which is why it found its way so naturally into the story.
What are your future works?
I’ve just completed a personal memoir about my life in the Nilgiris, which has been a very different and enjoyable writing experience. I’m also working on another work of fiction, although that is still at a very nascent stage and I’m quite happy to let it find its own way for the moment.
On the cinema side, I have a couple of screenplays I’m working on, and there are a few film and series ideas on the cards. So there is quite a bit happening, but I’ve reached a point where I don’t feel the need to rush from one project to the next. I’d rather work on the stories that genuinely excite me and see where they lead.