Even as Senna Hegde’s latest film Avihitham continues its theatrical run and has drawn primarily positive critical appreciations, the filmmaker and his backers have announced their next feature set in Kanhangad. Titled Blood-y, the upcoming film is slated for a 2026 release. The project reunites the same production team behind Avihitham, namely Mukesh R Mehta, Harris Desom, P B Anish, C V Sarathi and Senna, under the banners E4 Experiments, Imagin Cinemas and Marley State of Mind.
Blood-y will also reunite Senna with key technicians from Avihitham, including his regular cinematographer and creative director Sreeraj Raveendran, music director Sreerag Sasi and editor Sanath Sivaraj. Announcing the new film on social media, Senna wrote, “We have celebrated the simple, the sincere, the everyday Kanhangad heart. Now it is time to stain it a little. This is our descent into desire, deceit, and decay. BLOOD-Y, because every paradise deserves its hell.”
Co-producer Sarathi offered a more expansive thematic cue in a parallel note, describing Blood-y as beginning with “a gruesome murder on a sunny morning along Poinachi Highway” and widening into a narrative that tracks the flow of crime, gold, narcotics and violence across Kasaragod, coastal Karnataka and beyond, stretching historically from the 1990s to the present and geographically from Pakistan and Dubai to Amsterdam, Bangkok and Myanmar. “Violence seeps into daily life like an unseen blanket, where everything seems calm yet danger brews beneath the surface,” he wrote, framing the film as “yet another from the Kanhangad cinematic universe... the underbelly of Kasaragod, because every paradise deserves its hell.”
Blood-y continues Senna’s recurring engagement with his home terrain in Kasaragod. His debut docu-fiction 0-41, followed by his breakout Thinkalazhcha Nishchayam, 1744 White Alto and the ongoing Avihitham, were all set in Kanhangad. Padmini remains the lone exception in his Malayalam work in terms of setting.
