Annakili

<p>In Thengumarada, a village in the region of , a young woman named Annakili falls in love with Thyagarajan, the newly arrived local teacher. But as he has to support his mother and sister financially, Thyagarajan marries another girl, Annakili’s friend Sumathi, daughter of a wealthy landowner. Azhagappan, a womaniser, director of the local cinema theatre, then wants to marry Annakili but she refuses. In retaliation and in order to blackmail Annakili into marrying him, he later kidnaps Thyagarajan’s young son and spreads rumours about Annakili among the villagers. Annakili manages to save the child from the cinema building that has caught fire during her struggle with Azhagappan. She escapes with the child, and dies in Thyagarajan’s arms. When met , the latter asked if the former had composed any songs; Ilaiyaraaja casually sang a bunch of songs, one of which was “Annakkili Unnai Theduthe”. An impressed Panchu Arunachalam decided to write a screenplay based on these songs and on the story written by to accommodate these songs; the film would be titled . While scouting for various locations, it was Sivakumar who finally zeroed in and suggested a village situated at Nilgiris district which had only 10 homes and mostly has huts where they primarily shot the film except for the climax which was shot in Chennai and Salem Ratna Studios. The filming was completed within a month. The film was made on a shoestring budget under ₹4 lakh (worth ₹4.7 crore in 2021 prices) The climax, featuring a theatre being set on fire, was inspired by the 1942 film . The soundtrack was composed by Ilaiyaraaja, who made his debut as composer with this film, and the lyrics were written by Panchu Arunachalam. Ilaiyaraaja used the techniques of modern film music orchestration, fusing and music with . The soundtrack became hugely popular and its success established Ilaiyaraaja as a leading composer in Tamil cinema. “Machanai Paartheengala”—which Ilaiyaraaja composed and sung at a marriage before the film’s release—eventually became a huge success. was released on 14 May 1976. Many distributors refused to buy the film as they felt it looked like an , which led Arunachalam to sell the film to new distributors at a lower price. , in a review dated 30 May 1976, was positive towards the film, particularly the performances of Sujatha, Sivakumar and Srikanth, but felt it would have been better in colour. According to Sivakumar, the response for first two shows were poor, it picked up only on the third day due to positive word-of-mouth. According to an article in the magazine , the film “took Tamil audiences by storm”. The film ran successfully for 25 weeks and celebrated silver jubilee and it ran for 205 days in Irudhaya Theatre at Kovai. It won the , and also received (equivalent to 30 lakh or US$36,000 in 2023) subsidy from the government of Tamil Nadu. attained in Tamil cinema. Writing for , Nandhu Sundaram noted that the film, “Made during the first wave of feminism in Tamil cinema heralded by directors , , and , came as a powerful crash course in gender equality”.</p>