The Disturbing Details Of The Real Incident Got Me Tensed: Soubin Shahir on Manjummel Boys

Chidambaram is coming out with his sophomore directorial outing Manjummel Boys (2024), after the blockbuster success of Jan.E.Man (2021). The new film, bankrolled by Soubin Shahir under his home banner Parava Films, is one of the most anticipated films from Malayalam cinema this year.

The survival thriller, which is based on real events that transpired in the infamous ‘Guna Caves’ located in Kodaikanal, tells the story of a group of friends stuck in the cave with no one to rescue them. Manjummel Boys features one of the biggest ensemble casts from the current generation of actors including Soubin Shahir, Sreenath Bhasi, Ganapathi, Lal Jr, Khalid Rahman and Deepak Parambol, to name a few.

Opening up about how he became part of the film as a producer and lead star, Soubin Shahir shares, “I was offered this script as a package, by which I mean that when Chidambaram came to me with the script for a narration, I already knew the real life incident it is based on. So I wanted to be part of it. The film, however, kept on getting bigger from the initial stages and I took it up as no other production house was able to get what we were trying to do with this film. We might have faced questions like, 'Why are you shooting it on such a grand scale?', 'Why do you want to make a friendship-based movie with this budget?', so on and so forth. So it would have been difficult otherwise.”

Soubin goes on to share, “I always felt that in order for the film to be made in the best possible way, without compromising on the technical quality, we would have to spend that much money and work on the details. I knew that this would be a time-consuming process and since I regularly had creative discussions with Chidambaram, I knew what he wanted to do and we were able to strike a common ground early on.”

Adding about his experiences shooting for the film and finding the conviction to lead the cast playing the reel version of the unfortunate group of friends and the tragedy that transpired many years ago, Soubin says, "It's very interesting in the sense that we made a documentary about the real survivors, where one person would tell their version and we cut to the next person sharing their experience, which would be different in some way."

 “They recalled some disturbing details and events, which got me tensed not only as the producer but also as the actor who plays an important role. I used to call the real people who faced this issue to get to know their inputs at all stages. I would also meet them in person and honestly, I was scared thinking about how we would pull this off. We kept in touch with them to maintain that sense of truth.

Soubin is also looking forward to showing the film to the real life group of friends. “We haven't shown them the final film. We wanted to wait till the release and give them a product of the highest quality that met the truth of their lives and delivered.”