Anjali Patil on Sailesh Rathnakumar’s ‘Selvi’: ‘Women characters have more space in regional cinema’

Patil, who calls herself ‘an accidental actor’, and director Rathnakumar discuss their Tamil indie on migrant nurses which won two awards at 2026 Busan International Film Festival

Updated - October 16, 2026 05:05 pm IST

Actor-producer Anjali Patil at the 31st Busan International Film Festival. | Photo Credit: Stephanie Cornfield

When Anjali Patil walked in at the 31st Busan International Film Festival, people recalled her as the actress from With You, Without You (2012), Prasanna Vithanage’s Sri Lankan film that had premiered there too. This week, she was both the titular actor and producer of her independent Tamil film, Selvi, on the invisible lives of migrant home-care nurses. Directed by debutant Sailesh Rathnakumar, Selvi premiered in the Vision-Asia section and picked up two awards: Hylife Vision Award and the Taipei Film Commission Award.

In such Hindi films as Newton (2017), Mere Pyare Prime Minister (2018) and Kaun Pravin Tambe? (2022), one has seen Patil helm both seemingly simple to complex and layered characters with an unhurried ease and gravitas. She’s influenced by German contemporary dancer Pina Bausch, the mother of modern dance.

Patil’s Selvi takes on the weight of responsibility — her own, her family’s, even of her roommates. Thinking of herself, or stealing moments to sleep, is a luxury denied to her. “Selvi is a really complex character, unseen, average and mundane, something I get pulled towards. I wanted to play her,” says Patil, who has previously acted in Tamil films such as Pa. Ranjith’s and Rajinikanth’s Kaala (2018) and the psychological thriller Kuthiraivaal (2021).

Anjali Patil plays the titular Selvi in the Tamil independent film produced by her company Anahat Films.

Talking about his sound-driven film, with the audio helmed by Anand Krishnamoorthi (Ponniyin Selvan I & II), Rathnakumar, a writer-producer at Patil’s Anahat Films, says, “Selvi bridges the gap between arthouse and commercial.” Selvi received the Red Sea Fund (for post-production) and was a Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum (HAF) Work-in-Progress project, which gave it the Asian film market exposure.

The story comes from Rathnakumar’s cinematographer Bargav Sridhar who was introduced to the home-care industry when his mother suffered a lung ailment during COVID-19. “A lot of home-care nurses come from small towns (Nagercoil, Tirunelveli, etc.). When they enter the homes, all they bring is care. We don’t see the weight of their emotional burden and we felt compelled to tell this story,” says Rathnakumar, a Prague Film School alumnus who has assisted veteran editor B. Lenin on sound and music in films.

Debutant director Sailesh Rathnakumar at Busan International Film Festival. | Photo Credit: Stephanie Cornfield

Edited excerpts from a conversation with Patil and Rathnakumar:

In Selvi, there is an uncanny parallel of the migrant nurses’ story to Payal Kapadia’s Cannes Grand Prix winner All We Imagine As Light (2024).

Sailesh Rathnakumar: We didn’t have the intention of capitalising on what was happening in cinema at the time. We had already written Selvi before Payal’s film released. When we watched another film exploring a similar world, we felt that the premise we were handling (home-care nurses) and what we were communicating through Selvi was very different. It was a very strong emotional response rather than a calculated response.

Tamil cinema has not really had a parallel film movement like some other regional industries. Is that changing?

The landscape in Tamil cinema is changing. A lot of content-driven cinema has found its way into the commercial scene. But there is still a certain level of difficulty in making independent cinema sustainable.

I’m a very big fan of Mani Ratnam. Something he said in his book has stayed with me. He mentioned that he is a fan of (Robert) Bresson and other European filmmakers, but taking that path requires a lot of courage, especially in the commercial aspect of cinema, where it is driven by money and the pure merit of art is not very sustainable.

We didn’t intend to make pure arthouse cinema. We wanted to find a middle ground where people who like arthouse could appreciate it, and commercial audiences could also watch it.

Actor-director-producer Anjali Patil in Busan. | Photo Credit: Stephanie Cornfield

Anjali, how did you prepare to play a Tamil character when you are not a Tamilian?

Anjali Patil: When you are doing a character from a different culture, the most interesting point is the cultural nuances of that body, of that gender in that particular society. Me being a Maharashtrian girl who studied in Pune and Delhi, I have a different chemical texture to a Tamil girl.It is difficult picking up the language, even though I’ve been learning Tamil for over a year. We did extensive dubbing and then redubbed for me to sound more native, more local. We did the entire film again.