Kshanam

Kshanam
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Ravikanth Perepu
Produced by	PVP cinema
Screenplay by	Adivi Sesh Ravikanth Perepu
Story by	Adivi Sesh
Starring	Adivi Sesh Adah Sharma Anasuya Bharadwaj Vennela Kishore Satyam Rajesh Satyadev Kancharana
Music by	Sricharan Pakala
Cinematography	Shaneil Deo
Edited by	Arjun Shastri Ravikanth Perepu
Production company	PVP cinema
Release dates	26 February 2016 (2016-02-26)
Running time	120 minutes
Country	India
Language	Telugu
Budget	₹1.1 crore (US$160,000)
Box office	₹5 crore (US$740,000)(17 days)

Kshanam (English: Moment) is a 2016 Indian Telugu thriller film released worldwide on 26 February 2016. It was directed by Ravikanth Perepu, with Adivi Sesh and Adah Sharma in lead roles and Anasuya Bharadwaj, Vennela Kishore, Satyam Rajesh appearing in supporting roles. Music is by Sricharan Pakala and cinematography by Shaneil Deo. The film opened to critical acclaim.^[1]

Plot

Rishi (Adivi Sesh) is a workaholic working as an investment banker in the San Fransisco in United States. After he mismanages a blind date setup by his friend, Rishi is desperate to stay away from relationships. He receives a voice mail left by his ex-girlfriend Swetha (Adah Sharma) who asks him for help but doesn't state what her problem is and asks him to come to India. Rishi leaves for India on the pretext of attending his cousin's marriage. Rishi arrives in Hyderabad and checks-in at the Marriott. He goes to meet Swetha at a restaurant, and hires a car from Babu Khan (Vennela Kishore) who is the owner of a rental car service. At the restaurant Rishi learns that Swetha has a daughter named Riya who was kidnapped while on her way to school. The kidnappers injured Swetha and escaped in her car in which she claims her daughter was. She tells Rishi that she had no help from the police or anyone else in finding her. Swetha asks Rishi to help her in finding her daughter to which Rishi agrees, and she says that her husband, Karthik has completely drowned himself in his work to forget about the incident. They both start by looking up the case file in the police station where the police state that the case has been closed due to lack of information and they cannot look up for information that doesn't exist. Rishi then visits the Riya's school from where Riya was kidnapped and talks to the school's principal about the kidnapping. The principal states that there was no kidnapping at all. Rishi reluctantly continues to look for Riya, and follows Bobby, Shwetha's brother in law, who is involved with drugs and other illegal activities, after seeing Bobby in a CC camera across from the school the day before Riya was kidnapped. When Rishi follows Bobby, he sees him meet up with some Nigerians, and continues to follow the Nigerians to the location of a secret meeting, where Rishi shockingly sees Babu Khan dealing with them. After a confrontation, Babu Khan admits that he transports drugs from Bobby and his group to other locations and gets paid a vast amount to keep shut about the whole encounter.

After facing many dead ends with no evidence of anything, the police have also closed the case of Riya's kidnapping. Then, a discouraged Rishi gets an idea to place an ad in the newspaper of the details of Riya's kidnapping, as no one seems to even know of it even happening, against Shwetha's will. Rishi gets many false phone calls from people looking to get some money out of it, and finally he gets a call from Karthik, Shwetha's husband, telling him to please meet him in Karthik's office. Rishi, claiming the identity of a police officer goes to meet him. He is then told that Shwetha, after recovering from the week long coma the "kidnappers" had induced by beating her, started to look around for her daughter ,Riya, but in fact the couple had no children and this was purely shwetha's imagination. This shocks Rishi and goes around thinking of any evidence of Riya's existence. He realizes that Shwetha was only able to produce one passport size photo of Riya and there were no other pictures of Riya in the house, the principal of the school denied ever seeing her, and the CC tv footage of the incident from the house across the street from the site of the crime doesnt show a little girl in the car. Rishi goes to Shwetha's house and confronts her about her imaginative lie, where she breaks down and says that no one believes that she has a daughter even though she does. She says that after so many years if she can remember Rishi, how could she forget about the little girl she had with her two months ago. Rishi tries to calm her down and logically prove to her that she doesnt have a daughter, and as he roams around the house, he sees a wall with demarcations of height with dates along the marks, showing that there infact was a little girl whose height was being measured and Shwetha DID have a daughter. Once Rishi realizes this and turns around, he sees that Shwetha has jumped off the balcony, committing suicide.

Shwetha is shown to be dead, when he walks around realizing what a big mistake he's made, when he is approached by Babu Khan, saying that he had seen her daughter once in Bobby's lair, and he is admitting this truth now as he feels guilty that he could've saved her life. This causes Rishi to continue the investigation, and asks Babu Khan to somehow bring Bobby into the hands of the police, and Babu Khan is able to do so. Bobby goes under interrogation by Ravi Chowdary (Satyam Rajesh), who is new to the Hyderabad police, and starts to punch him, as Bobby started to make snarky remarks at him. This causes ACP Jaya (Anasuya Bharadwaj) to burst into the interogation room and points a gun at Bobby to get him to tell the truth. She turns away for a second, and Bobby grabs the gun from her and points it at her, which causes her to shoot him as an act of self defense. Because of this, Rishi now has no leads as to where Riya is. ACP Jaya invites him to her house where he sees pictures of her and her husband, who has passed away in an accident. Rishi also reveals to her that Shwetha and him were college sweethearts, but on the day of their eloped wedding, Shwetha gets a call from her dad at the hospital, moments before tying the knot, causing her to marry the groom of her dad's choice. After telling the ACP this story, the ACP takes a picture of him saying its just a formality, and Rishi leaves to meet with Babu Khan. Meanwhile, Babu Khan is being attacked by some of Bobby's gang members, and is dead as Rishi arrives. One of the gang members leaves his phone behind, and Rishi sees some SMS' from unknown numbers asking if the murder is done etc, and he discovers a mms with his picture and a message saying 'this is Rishi, just to confirm', and the picture is the one that the ACP recently took of him.

Rishi shockingly realizes that the ACP wants to kill him, and realizes that she may be behind the kidnapping. He runs around the slums to find ACP Jaya's maid and asks her, at gunpoint, where the ACP is, to which she replies frightened, saying she is at the farmhouse. Rishi runs to the farmhouse and tries to secretly search the parameters of the farmhouse, when he feels a gun at his head, and the frame is zoomed out to show the acp pointing a gun from behind, and takes him inside the house. He starts to yell, asking her what she did to Riya when she tells him to shut up as Riya is sleeping upstairs. Rishi, shocked, asks her why she would do such a thing, when she reveals that Riya is better off with the ACP because otherwise she would've been killed by the orders of Karthik. She continues saying that one day she went to Bobby's lair to get two boxes of Drugs and showed up early, when she heard a muffled scream from inside and found Riya who was blindfolded. As the ACP undid the blindfold, Riya hugged her and called her "amma" (mother), which struck an emotional nerve for the ACP who decided to keep her, as her husband and her were planning on naming their future daughter Riya. The ACP then strung together a meticulous plan to keep Riya for herself. As Karthik already wanted to get rid of Riya, ACP convinces him to give away Riya as a bribe for cancelling out his felonies, and told him to tell everyone that Riya had died. Since Shwetha was in a coma, they planned for Karthik to tell all of their friends, family and anyone who knew of Riya's existence to behave as if Riya was never real, under the pretense that it would cause Shwetha emotional damage if she found out that her daughter was "dead". Karthik also took away any pictures of Riya from their home and replaced any evidence that Riya was real. Once Shwetha came out of the coma, Karthik acted as if they has never had a daughter. Though the ACP had wanted to kill off Shwetha when she was in a coma itself, Karthik wanted to keep her alive in this horrible condition due to his sadistic nature. The ACP reveals that Shwetha would cry for days at a time and Karthik would happily report this to her. Shocked at this information, Rishi asks her why Karthik had wanted to kill Riya, and it is revealed that Riya wasn't actually Karthik's, but was someone else's, as Karthik was sterile, or incapable of producing children. This causes Rishi to realize that Riya is actually his, as two days before Shwetha's wedding they had made love. At this time, Ravi chowdary, and the rest of the police force enters and shoots ACP dead, as Rishi had a phone call with Ravi the entire time so he could hear the revelations. The movie ends with Rishi meeting his daughter for the first time.

Cast

Adivi Sesh as Rishi
Adah Sharma as Swetha
Anasuya Bharadwaj as ACP Jaya Bharadwaj
Amit Sachdev as Commissioner Lucknow

Vennela Kishore as Babu Khan
Satyam Rajesh as Ravi Chowdary
Ravi varma as karthik
Uma Akkineni

Release and Reception

Kshanam was released on 26 February 2016 across Telangana and Andhra Pradesh and received positive critical acclaim.^[2]^[3] It was rated 3.25 by Idlebrain.com^[4] and The Hindu gave it 4 stars. DOP was Shaneil Deo. Kshanam is very well executed thriller.^[5]

Box office

In 10 days since its release, Kshanam grossed about ₹ 4.8 crores at the Telugu (AP and Telangana) Box office.^[6] It collected $65,679 (₹ 44.83 lakh) from 27 screens at the US box office in the first weekend.^[7] In its second weekend, it collected $28,889 from 20 screens at the US box office and its 10-day total US collection stands at $111,037 (₹ 74.68 lakh).^[8]

References

External links

Kshanam at the Internet Movie Database

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